Tinder Box
by tweedandpaisley
Summary: Katniss was the Mockingjay and the Mockingjay was the spark, but the kindling was already piled and ready.  A series of stories leading up to the 74th games and through the Rebellion, mostly focusing on Johanna.
1. 70

70.

Annie is 18, tall, and her dark brown hair cascades in waves down her back as she takes the stage next to the District 4 escort.

District 4 is a career district but only because its children are trained from a young age for a career on the sea. Its wilderness is not bounded by fences. Livelihoods depend on skills with nets, spears, hooks, knives, and beneath the surface of the water lurk dangers that every person is aware of.

Annie is one of the best divers in the district, has been for years, and everyone knows it. No one will volunteer for her, she is not weak. In the districts, where labor is cheap and machines are expensive, people pick crops by hand, mine coal with picks, free dive for oysters and sponges, and Annie has been diving, knife strapped to her leg, since she was 14.

She is good with her knives, can cleanly filet a fish in minutes, has fought off sharks and strange large squid in deep, murky water.

So she stands tall on the stage, the sea breeze lightly ruffling her hair and twisting the hem of the dress that mother had laid out for her "one last time" around her legs, and looks out above the crowd with her mouth set in a grim line. Her façade only breaks slightly when she sees the boy that is called as her district partner. He looks so young, so delicate, his dark hair only making his face, blanched white the second his name was called, look even paler. She waits for someone to volunteer for him - he is too young – but she realizes that that is what 16 looks like, and that 16 is old enough.

The rest of the day is a blur, and she feels like she is outside of her own body, watching as she says goodbye to her parents, her younger brother and sister, her best friend, her cousin. Her parents are as practical as always, giving her advice on spear techniques and knots, but it is all things they know she already knows, and she sees her own fear reflected in the eyes of her family, the same green eyes as her own. When they say _I love you_ it sounds like _goodbye_.

Her cousin presses a bracelet of mother of pearl around her wrist before she goes, and Annie is soothed by the shimmering piece of the sea that she is bringing with her, the last piece of the sea she will see.

Finnick and Mags are mentoring them. They always mentor together, the others switching off in the other years. Finnick always seems to be going to the Capitol anyway, so it must make more sense to have him mentor while he is there.

They ask if they can mentor Annie and Dover together, and she agrees quickly, she had seen them as a team from the second his name was called. Annie thinks that it is as much for Finnick to translate Mags' stroke garbled speech as any strategy on their part and doesn't question it.

Annie expects Finnick to be the cocky lothario that everyone knows from television, but she realizes quickly that that isn't who he actually is. He is... a real person, she realizes, more to herself than anything else, not a collection of muscles and quips and saucy winks. She starts to understand just how powerful television and perception really are, since even she, another possible Career tribute from District 4, had started to see Finnick as something other, a celebrity certainly, but something else, as someone so unlike herself as to be subject to different rules in her mind.

She realizes with a start that that is how people in the Capitol watch the games, and it terrifies her.

She goes through the prep work, the parade, the training, the interviews, and she does well. She is beautiful, and she is strong, and she quickly becomes a part of the Career pack, making them take Dover with her. But when she looks around the training room from her place at the end of the Career table, she realizes that while she is scared for herself, she is scared for all the other children in the room too. She is one of four 18 year olds, everyone else is the room is younger than she is, and it is all that she can do not to give every one of them an encouraging smile, a pat on the arm, a hand with their knots. She knows that they are her enemies now and that her only focus should be on the best way to kill them to get back to her family, but she can't.

She knows that she won't win these games.

Finnick had started a little when he saw her in her dress for the parade of tributes, one deep blue sleeve exactly matching Dover's suit fading in one curling swoop of feathered fabric across her body until it pooled frothy white at her feet, the two of them together one cresting wave. She looked beautiful, but frightening, unlike herself, _like a Tribute,_ she thought when she looked at her reflection. But when she laughed "Havan and her team did okay this year, right?" up at Finnick, he just nodded, quiet for once, and she felt like he saw her as something other than a tribute for the first time.

Annie knows she needs to sleep, they are getting their training scores tomorrow and she should be rested, but she can't. She taps softly on Dover's door, since they had spent the nights on the train talking, but he doesn't answer. She is glad. She worries about him even though she knows it is ridiculous, they are all doomed. Plus, he is just as good with a spear as she is, and even better, he is clever and resourceful. She can't help herself though, he is the same age as her brother.

She is about to turn back to her room when she notices softly flickering light illuminating the hallway, and finds Finnick sitting in the viewing room, not watching the muted television.

He doesn't seem surprised to see her, wandering the halls alone in socked feet, just shifts to make room for her on the couch. She sits in the corner of it, making herself small, tucking her legs in and resting her chin on top of her knees. She looks at the beautiful man in front of her and sees how tired he looks, how sad, and has to remind herself that he is barely older than she is.

"Couldn't sleep?" He asks her with a wry smile.

She just smiles back at him. She wants to pull his head to her shoulder, run her hands through his hair, take away some of the pain and weariness that has settled around him like a blanket. They sit in silence a while longer, watching the play of light across the walls.

"Not everyone gets to say goodbye, you know?" She starts quietly into the silence, not looking at him. "Our world is dangerous. You lost your father in a freak storm just a couple of years ago, right?"

He is looking down, and she doesn't wait for him to answer. "I'm glad I got to say goodbye. It's just... hard. To... sleep," she ends lamely.

He looks up at her, his eyes soft, a look she has never seen in them before, "You could win, you know."

She smiles sadly at him and shakes her head, then reaches out to him. She has fleeting time left in this world and nothing to lose, so she does what she wants, draws his head to her shoulder and runs her fingers through his hair. She feels his body relax against hers, sees his eyes close and his face soften, and she feels better, looking over his head at the wall, lost in her own thoughts.

* * *

><p>The arena is forested, cut through with one fast running stream fed by a narrow waterfall from a giant dammed reservoir that is so far away from the Cornucopia, Annie thinks it must be the edge of the arena. The sheer sides of the dam rise imposingly out from the forest, so high that none of the tributes even think to try to get to the top. When the 60 seconds are up, and they are let loose in the arena, Annie finds that her focus narrows the same way it does when she is diving. She sees Dover across the circle and focuses solely on getting to him, grabbing knives on her way. She doesn't see so much as feel the threats on either side of her, quickly dodging a flying knife, throwing one of her own in the direction that an axe swipe came from, not looking at anything other than the goal in front of her. She knows that if she sees a child's face looking at her, she won't be able to do anything, and Dover will be alone with a Career pack that doesn't want him. By the time she gets to him, she has a deep cut in her left arm and a superficial cut across her cheek and no idea if any of her own knives hit their marks. As she catches her breath, back to back with Dover, she looks out across the devastation of the Cornucopia. She doesn't know if it any of the children on the ground are there because of – she retches violently but nothing comes up.<p>

"We have to get out of here," she says urgently to Dover.

He looks at her questioningly, seems to do a quick calculation in his mind, then picks up a pack and heads off into the forest, Annie following close behind, armed to the teeth and with a pack of her own.

They do okay, the two of them, going deep into the forest, fighting off the muttations that populate the trees, getting food and water and just enough from their mentors to survive. Every night they see the faces in the sky, and it is all Annie can do not to cry, but she knows that what it mostly means is that there is enough other action to keep the Capitol audience entertained. They are safe.

But on the fourth day, she knows that there are only 8 of them left, and there hasn't been a cannon blast in hours. Something is going to happen, the Gamesmakers will engineer something. She tries to prepare herself as she goes to the stream to fill their water bottles while Dover cleans up their camp. She turns to head back and suddenly knows that something is horribly, horribly wrong; the forest is too quiet.

She slips back as quickly and quietly as she can, but when she gets back to the little clearing they had made, she knows it's too late. She makes eye contact with Dover for one horribly charged moment. He starts to scream 'No' at her, telling her to stay back, but it is silenced in his throat as Glint's sword takes his head off in one swoop. The other three from Districts 1 and 2 are around him, but she can't stop herself from moving toward him because in that moment, something inside of her breaks completely, and she is gone.

Annie is screaming, and the sound is haunted and inhuman, and the four pairs of eyes that had snapped to her with bloodlust are suddenly filled with fear and confusion instead. It is just when they are about to shake off that fear and regrip their weapons, that the ground begins to move.

The earthquake is epic, unnaturally long, violently rending the ground, throwing down trees, and the other four start to panic and run as best they can. Annie stays rooted to the ground, unmoving, unseeing as trees fall around her, miraculously not touching her, because the world has already been destroyed, and she doesn't know if this destruction is happening inside of her or outside.

There is a horrible cracking noise above everything else, but it is only the distant sound of rushing water that snaps Annie back to reality. If she knows nothing else, she knows water, so she starts running to the highest point she can see, not knowing if there is anyone else around her. She looks back in the direction of the dam but can only see a fast moving wall of water, 20 feet high at least, and she starts climbing the biggest tree she can find as quickly as she can. The water is on her before she knows it, ripping past her, pinning her to the tree, trying to knock the breath out of her as she starts to lose her grip. But then it is over, the water has nowhere else to go, and it quiets even as it continues to fill the arena. They are trapped in a giant bubble filled with brackish water, so choked with trees and dirt, drowned animals and muttations, that it seems thick. But swimming is something she can do, something she is good at, so she swims.

She doesn't know how long she spends in the water, but she hears the cannon blasts go off one after the other, until it is Claudius Templesmith's voice that she hears announcing her as the winner of the 70th Hunger Games, and she is pulled onto the hovercraft, dripping and achingly skinny and broken.

She doesn't know how much time passes. She doesn't know anything. There are flashes, and she sees Mags, Finnick, unnamed doctors in long white coats, that break up the darkness for a couple of seconds before she lets herself fall back into it. For a strange second she thinks she sees President Snow, but she knows that can't be true.

There are times when she is awake enough that they think they can get her out of bed, dressed, back out into the world. They tell her that everyone is so excited that she won, to hear her interview, watch her recap, go to her feast, as if these things would fill her with anything but terrible fear. But every time she starts to walk, the floor turns dark and liquid, filled with the bodies of the 23 children that she decapitated with her own hands, and she comes to back in her hospital bed.

* * *

><p>She feels him before she opens her eyes, the warmth of his hands around hers and the depression his body makes where he is sitting on her hospital bed. She wants to stay in the floating in between, where nothing can hurt her and warm hands hold her back from being flung into the empty void, but she forces herself to open her eyes.<p>

Finnick is there, in front of her, as golden and beautiful as ever, and the sight of him, of anything so perfect, when the world is so twisted and dark makes her eyes fill with tears.

"You shouldn't exist," she croaks, her voice raspy with disuse.

He starts and looks at her in surprise. "You're up."

"Oh good," he breathes, lowering his head onto their clasped hands, "Good. Thank goodness."

He looks slightly relieved but mostly worried and so, so tired. Is he worried about her? Is she making him look so tired? She is concerned about him, feels guilty, and that she can't handle. The world is going dark around him, and he is changing, morphing into Dover, and his head is on the ground, and he is Finnick, and Dover, and her brother at once. She wants to scream - she is screaming - but her voice is gone.

She has to get it back. If she can just put the head back on, put him back together, then everything will be fine. She is trying to get out of the bed, but there are a thousand tiny strings holding her back, keeping her from fixing him. And she is thrashing against them, trying to rip through them with her fingers, but she can't manage to grasp them. They are everywhere but where her hands are and then she can't even move those anymore, and she is helpless. She can't even find his head, and he is never going to be fixed, and the world is always going to be dark.

She hears him, from far away, telling her to come back.

There is something so plaintive in his voice that she finds that she wants to, for him. So she moves toward his voice, not back, to where things are light, and then she is back in the hospital room, his green eyes bright with tears looking into hers, his weight holding her arms down.

Finnick's head sags in relief, and he lets her arms go, moves onto the bed next to her, and pulls her towards him. He holds her head against his shoulder and runs his fingers through the tangles in her hair, just like she did to him a lifetime ago. She lets herself sink into the comfort of it, breathes in the clean scent of his shirt, the sweet, musky smell of his skin, and cries.

"Why?" She asks into his chest after her tears slow.

"Why?" He repeats and pauses. "You're my responsibility, my mentee."

She nods once, eyes closed, and takes a deep, shuddering breath in.

"You know that night?" He says into the silence because he knows he owes her more, "You held me. Like this. You knew exactly what I needed even though I didn't know it myself. And you didn't want anything from me. I couldn't remember the last time-" He pauses. "I had forgotten that it was possible to be held and feel... safe." He says these last words into her hair.

She lies there, absorbing his words, eyes closed. She is still so tired. She feels okay here in his arms, safe, and her breathing evens out, slows, and she thinks she can sleep. Real sleep. She doesn't know how she is going to survive, isn't even sure she wants to, doesn't know if she is ever going to make it out of this room or if she will ever stop seeing horrors that she isn't even sure actually happened, but right now she feels safe.

When he slowly disentangles himself from her and rests her head on a pillow, she is asleep. He presses a kiss onto her forehead, thinks he sees a glimmer of a look of peace pass over her face, and walks out of the room, something warm and unexpected suffusing his body.


	2. 71

71.

Johanna is 16 when she is reaped, 17 by the time she is in the arena, but she looks younger. She is short, and slight, and she looks so afraid all the time, always crying or about to cry, with sheets of long red brown hair covering most of her face. No one pays any attention to her, not the other tributes, not the commentators, the Gamesmakers, the viewers, not even her own mentor. It doesn't change in the arena. She grabs a pack and a pair of axes and gets out of the Cornucopia area without anyone else sparing her a second glance.

When she is alone in the windswept, craggy wilderness, she carefully hacks off all her hair with the razor sharp edge of one of her axes, and the face that she reveals to Panem is now dry eyed, sharply intelligent, older. There are only 5 tributes left by the time anyone pays attention to Johanna, who has been quietly surviving on the edges of the arena, biding her time. The Gamesmakers have been pushing them all closer and closer together, making the area with any vegetation smaller and smaller, until the 5 of them are hunting each other in a tiny oasis among a sea of unforgiving rock.

Now there was no hesitation in the way Johanna held herself, held her axes, and for the first time, Panem saw what Johanna really was, electric hatred sparking from her eyes, taut muscles, and axes that were extensions of her own body. Extensions that she buried with vicious fervor into the bodies of the four remaining tributes, one after the other, seemingly impervious to the pain of the many wounds that were inflicted on her, until she collapsed, panting, into the rocks, blood obscuring one side of her face and dripping down her leg.

The energy drained out of her body, and when the hovercraft picked her up, the winner of the 71st Hunger Games, she was crouched over her axe, trying to rub the blood and viscera off of it in the tiny ribbon of dirt between two boulders, succeeding only in covering it with her own hot blood.

She gets put back together, makes it through the interviews and the victory banquet. Her team dresses her differently now, pairing her new short hair with plunging backs and dramatic jewelry. She has just as many conversations about her hair – they are so concerned about her damned hair – as about her strategic win. Both conversations are laced with a false admiration that fills her with rage, makes her want to scream at these people who hate anything they can't predict and control. The look that President Snow gives her when he places the Victor crown on her head scares her, freezes her inside even as she looks boldly back at him.

She goes back to District 7, moves with her father and brother into a big house in Victor's Village and tries to remember what it was like to be her.

Johanna never had too many friends, but she finds that she can't deal with anyone any more, and everyone drifts away to become someone she knew once. She doesn't know is she pushes them away or if they push her away, but the things that interest them, that used to interest her, don't anymore. And she finds that there is no reason now to fake it, to pretend, to just be nice.

She loves her family, fiercely, but they were never much for talking, and she finds she has trouble dealing even with them. They are the same but different. Her father still goes to work in the forest every day even though he doesn't have to meet the quotas any more, but he is even quieter than he was before, looks older, as if something is destroying him slowly from the inside.

She spends more and more time alone in the forest, hacking her rage into the trees, working her body to exhaustion, and hoping that she will be able to sleep.

She fills her house with things, beautiful things, a couple of which she makes herself, working with her brother to smooth and coax the fine wood from the saw mill into elegant, graceful chairs. It is as whole as she felt since the games, working silently with her brother in the shop on something they never would have been able to make before, not with both of them working full time, not out of solid walnut. One day she flings herself into his arms, surrounded by the familiar smell of sawdust and hot metal, clinging to him with the desperation of a drowning person, and he hugs her back, just as hard, blinking back tears.

On the last stop of her Victory tour, Snow tells her what she already knew, that the Capitol hates an upset, hates the underdog, and that a lot of people, important people, lost a lot of money on her games. But he tells her something new too, that there are ways to pay some of them back, favors to bestow.

"And if I refuse?" she spits back at him, the same electricity from the arena sparking in her eyes.

The president seems to warm himself on her rage, and just calmly readjusts the rose in his lapel as he replies.

"Did you ever wonder why Haymitch has no family?"

He looks at her significantly as the truth registers on her face.

She spins and walks out of the room, murderous rage filling her body. She laughs maniacally at the fact that she thought her life would be different after winning, that she would be out from under control of the Capitol. She can see the scared confusion on the faces of the guards and Avoxes that she passes on her way out of the presidential mansion, but it only makes her laugh more. They have no idea.

She promises herself that someday, somehow, she is going to kill Snow herself as she heads back to District 7 and the tattered remains of her life.


	3. 72  I

72.

Johanna's tribute dies in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, just like Johanna knew she was going to. She knows she should be upset, but all she really feels is jealous. She sighs as she pushes away from her mentor station, running a hand through her short hair. She shrugs at Blight.

"I knew that little thing didn't stand a chance."

She catches Haymitch's eye as she stands to leave, "Get me when your kids kick it. Shouldn't be long now, right? You can buy me a drink."

"You're a bitch, you know that right?"

She smiles a tricky little smile and blows him a kiss over her shoulder as she stalks out of the room.

That night she gets her first message from President Snow, a heavy card embossed with the presidential seal with a beautifully written name and address, and she knows there is no turning back. She had already decided if he was going to use her like that, she was going to use her body as a weapon too. She always knew her own strengths, her own power, and she could use this somehow to get what she needed from those pieces of shit that thought everything was for sale.

But she got more than she bargained for. She had used their games against them: outsmarted them, made them all look stupid, not in control. And they couldn't have that, not in the Capitol.

So the man calls her a little slut, a little whore, as he demands she undress herself in front of him. When her anger makes her hands shake so badly she can barely unbutton her shirt, he thinks it is fear, and he laughs.

So when she is naked, and he holds down her hands, slaps her face, and reaches for her neck, she can't stop herself. She isn't fully aware of what she is doing before he is laid out in front of her with a broken arm and a crippling knee to the groin, and she is walking back to the training center in a thin sweater and her underwear, daring anyone she passes on the streets to say anything.

Snow's retaliation is swift and brutal, and her brother is gone within days, before the games are over, before she could see him again.

She didn't know she could hurt more, that there were still worse horrors out there, but she can, and there are. She wants to cry, but she can't. The false tears before her games the last tears she has shed.

She doesn't know what to do, but she knows she can't sit alone in her room in the training center. The silence is suffocating, and she has already broken everything that she could hurl against the walls. She wants to collapse on the floor amid the wreckage of all the pretty Capitol things, but every time she closes her eyes, she sees her brother's face.

She stumbles up to Haymitch's room, hoping that he might be able to get her drunk enough to forget, but he isn't there. She kicks the empty bottle she finds on the floor and curses him under her breath for not leaving her any.

She keeps walking. She has to get out of the training center; she has to be somewhere other than here. She passes someone in the hall, she isn't even sure who, but, when they dare to look at her, lobs a _fuck you_ at them anyway.

She falls into the first bar she sees, the first place that lets slices of pumping music out to melt in the night air every time the door opens. There might have been a line, who knows, but it doesn't matter, not to her, those rules don't apply to her.

The place is crowded, hot, and loud, but she feels better in the crush of other people, with the thumping bass jostling any thoughts out of her mind.

She sidles up to the bar, and if the bartender is surprised to see her there, it is masked behind his strange yellow eyes and taut skin.

"What'll it be, Johanna?"

It still startles her to have complete strangers refer to her by name, but she covers it with a dark smile.

"Surprise me. Make it strong."

She flicks the garnish off the drink that is placed in front of her in disgust, and downs the whole thing in two long gulps, reveling in the harsh burn of the liquor against the back of her throat.

She pushes her way back through the people, the glow from the many television screens playing the Games dyeing everyone, even those with natural skin, a pale blue, and lets the music and the heat of the bodies and the alcohol fill her.

She is letting herself be moved by all the other people, eyes closed against the looks she is getting, when she feels someone grip her waist from behind, pulling her towards him. She spins quickly in the middle of the dance floor, arm raised to attack, but her arm is stopped in midair, and she finds herself looking into the famous green eyes of Finnick Odair.

He smiles at her seductively, still holding her arm above her head. "May I have this dance, Johanna?"

She glares at him, her body rigid between her arm and the floor, sizing him up, trying to figure out what he wants from her.

"I'm not as easy as you are Finnick," she says, emphasizing his name in return, "You are going to have to buy me a drink first. Probably more than one."

He just laughs and pulls her towards the bar. People part in front of them, gaping a little at sight of the two victors together, trying to play it cool even as they surreptitiously elbow each other.

It's crowded, but Finnick finds two seats and calls over to the bartender, who ignores everyone else to help them.

"Al!"

Johanna rolls her eyes at him. Of course Finnick knows the bartender's name.

"Al, get me one of your famous starbursts and," he says, turning generously towards Johanna, who is still glaring at him, "whatever she's having."

"You know the drill," she says to "Al", who had narrowed his eyes to see who "she" was and seemed surprised to see Johanna there.

"Right, a surprise," he answers.

The drink that is placed in front of her is clear as water with a deep red layer underneath. She picks up the long toothpick that is laid across the top of the glass and slowly pulls the cherry that was skewered in the middle of it off with her teeth, keeping her eyes locked on Finnick.

He looks right back at her, amused.

"What do you want Pretty Boy?" she asks, slowly stirring the layers of her drink together.

"I thought I already made that clear," he says, smiling, "a dance."

"We didn't get much of a chance to talk on your Victory Tour, and it's always good to get to know your fellow victors better." He pauses.

"Besides, I didn't know this was your type of thing. Wanted to see what you got. If you could keep up," he says, giving her a sideways glance.

"I don't have a 'thing,'" she spits back at him. "And _of course_ I can keep up with you."

"Well, I certainly wasn't expecting to see you here anyway."

"Wait, what are you doing here?" she asks suddenly. "In the Capitol I mean. Ford is mentoring this year." And when she looks at him this time, there is no game to her look, just the question.

He looks at her probingly. "I try to get in at least one trip to the Capitol a year." His voice is flat.

"I heard that Aquila Celes had to get surgery 2 days ago," he says slowly after a pause, still looking at her, "I heard they couldn't save his testicle."

The name sets her teeth on edge and she takes a long sip of her drink, but she can't help but smile at the last part.

"I hadn't heard that," she says, brown eyes wide and innocent. "But I am sure someone paid for it." And her eyes cloud over again.

Finnick nods and drains his drink, then orders them another round. The music is still pumping and people keep jostling into them, but they are quiet and alone in the middle of the noise.

"How's..." Johanna scours her memory, dredges up a snatch of a Capitol news report she must have passed somewhere, "Vega?" She has to make sure.

"Better than Aquila," he says, answering her unasked question. "But I guess you haven't heard that I have moved on."

And they both turn to their drinks, not wanting to let the other see the pain and pity in their eyes.

"What happened to that dance?" she says finally, and she pulls him off of his seat, towards the dance floor.

They push back through the crowds and people make space for them in the middle of the room. They are always going to be on display, especially when they are together.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," she says, getting a good look at him for the first time, "are you not even wearing a shirt under that suit? You can't be serious."

She shakes her head, but she smiles at him, a real smile.

He spins her around then pulls her to him, pressing her whole body against his and pushing his leg between hers. His hand is firmly on the bare skin of her lower back, and they move liquidly together.

"Like you're one to talk," he murmurs into her ear, "your shirt appears to be missing its back."

She throws back her head and laughs, and she realizes she likes this person, might be enjoying herself. Making a scene, sure, but with a partner in crime.

They move together effortlessly, flowing with the music. He pushes her up higher on his leg, and she gasps a little as he dips her back, sweeping her in a circle before she arches back up, his touch electric on the back of her neck. She snaps back to his neck and whispers to him between the clenched teeth of her frozen smile.

"I am going to kill him you know."

And he looks at her, eyes hard, the eyes of a warrior, "Not if I get there first."

* * *

><p>The Games end the next day, long after Johanna and Finnick stumbled out of the bar into the flash of a tabloid reporter's camera, after she walked back to the training center lost in thought about the truth of Finnick's persona, after she realized that she was never going to be anything other than what she was now. There was no "better."<p>

Dom is bringing his third victor home to District 2 and seems uncomplicatedly pleased, but Johanna finds herself wondering if it is just that everyone else is as good an actor as she is.

She is on edge, she wants to go home, to lose herself in the trees. Maybe then she will be able to cry. Maybe then she will stop feeling so hollow inside. But she has to stay and wait until the Capitol stitches its newest victor back together again and parades him out like the desperate prize pony he doesn't know he is.

She propels herself down to the training room, wrapping her hands in tape as she goes, not bothering to put a shirt on over her sports bra.

She feels slightly better after a couple hours with the punching bags.

She is sitting alone on the floor of the cavernous room, sweat spiking her short hair up in tufts, her dirty tape covered hand clutching a water bottle, when Finnick walks into the room, footsteps echoing in the emptiness.

"Been looking everywhere for you," he says when he is in front of her. "C'mon, clean yourself up, we're going out."

"Out," she says between breaths, raising an eyebrow at him. She wonders exactly when they started doing things together.

She extends a hand to him, and he grabs it, pulling her onto her feet.

"I take it you have to stick around for the banquet too?"

"I have a hot date," he says with his trademark smile.

They make their way back to her room, passing the empty rooms where the District 7 tributes had stayed, are going to stay.

"I see you did some redecorating," he says sitting on the bed after following her into the room.

"Huh?"

She is in the bathroom, stepping out of her shorts and wondering if she should be concerned about how frosted the glass door really is when she realizes that he means all the things that she destroyed.

"Oh, right, yeah. Some things needed to be… removed."

She rushes through her shower, uncomfortable that Finnick Odair is in her room. Not that she would ever let him know that.

She comes out wrapped in a towel to find Finnick lying flat on her bed, eyes closed, hands behind his head. She can't help staring at him a little. He really is beautiful, even in just a grey t-shirt and soft, dark blue pants tucked into his untied boots.

He opens his eyes to catch her looking at him, but she just gives him a look and says, "Really? You just put your boots on my bed? I sleep there you know."

"Oh, like you're afraid of getting dirty, Johanna."

"Screw you Pretty Boy. It's about the principle." But a little smile plays on her lips, and he doesn't move.

"Eyes closed at least," she says as she turns around, drops her towel, and pulls on tight black pants trimmed with leather and a loose white t-shirt. She turns around, scrubbing her hair with the towel, to find Finnick with his sea green eyes wide open.

He gives her a crooked grin as he swings his feet to the ground and stands.

"Ready?"

"Yeah. Perv."

She runs a quick hand through her hair and grabs the strip of leather with three smooth wood beads off of the dresser, wrapping it around her wrist.

Finnick looks questioningly at her.

"Token. Brother." She shrugs, and he nods.

"So, where are we going?" she asks him to push the thoughts that are coming out of her mind.

"Oh I thought I would show you around a little. Maybe do a little shopping. They have some beautiful things here you know. Beautiful furniture."

She knows that it's her "talent", but she hates how everyone in the country just knows things about her. She wonders when it is going to stop feeling strange.

So they walk around the Capitol, attracting more than a few admirers, mostly for Finnick. She watches him as his face changes almost imperceptibly, becoming smoother somehow, and his voice picks up the purring edge she remembers from television. He effortlessly flirts with the women and quite a few men who approach him, and he just as easily dodges their advances to send them on their way, not quite knowing what happened, but giddy nonetheless. She looks at him with new respect and understanding in her eyes.

They do go into a couple of the stores around the square, and it infuriates her anew, the wealth that is concentrated in the Capitol while the districts starve. She manages to keep herself to just a few nasty quips to the shopkeepers while Finnick smiles at them like she is an unruly child that is just so adorably willful. She wonders if she can slap him without attracting a Peacekeeper.

He keeps up a bright and steady banter while they wander the busy streets, telling her stories about District 4, Mags, Annie, his sister. Always happy, funny stories.

She keeps up with him even as she wonders what it is they are doing.

They keep walking away from the busy town center until other people get thinner and thinner on the ground and the stores and homes get shabbier. He looks around carefully, his talk finally slowing and quieting as he walks down an abandoned looking alley.

He slips into a dingy store, dragging her after him by her hand, and quickly walks though the whole thing, past a bored looking clerk who doesn't look up or in any way acknowledge their existence, out the back door, across another alley blocked from the main road by a fence, and into the basement of an unfinished building across the street.

"Finnick," Johanna hisses, "if you are trying to kill me and abandon my body in a decrepit building, I should probably let you know that I am kind of famous. Someone will probably figure it out. Also, I have been known to fight back."

Finnick just keeps his tight grip on her hand and fishes a tiny but very bright flashlight out of his pocket, illuminating the dark hallway.

"Come on, we're a little late."

"Late?" But she stumbles a little in the darkness as he pulls her along and has to hold back her questions to concentrate on walking.

He stops suddenly at one of the doors and she crashes into him.

"Finnick, what the hell are we doing he–" But she is stopped mid-question because the door swings open to reveal Haymitch sitting in the middle of the room in a pool of light, glass of white liquor in front of him.

"Uh huh," she says as she walks into the room, "as if this makes me feel better. If you guys are looking for some double team action, that is going to cost extra. And when did you start using a glass?" She pivots to face Haymitch.

"Special occasion." Haymitch says as he produces two more glasses out from somewhere and places them on the table.

"You're sure about this, right," Haymitch directs at Finnick, "because she seems like a pain in the ass."

"I'm sure," Finnick smiles as he pulls a chair up to the table and sits. "She grows on you."

"Right."

"Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?" Johanna is still standing, staring the two men down. "And why I have been dragged to the Rape Palace in order for it to happen?"

"Right," Haymitch starts, "well, the building isn't finished so there isn't any surveillance, which is the reason for this particular locale. As for the other question, Finnick and I have decided to include you in a little group that exists for like-minded individuals."

"Okay," she says slowly, but she sits in the chair that Haymitch kicks out for her, "and why exactly is that? You guys don't know anything about me. Why would I even want to?"

"Oh sweetheart," Haymitch laughs as he pours the three glasses full and places one in front of each of them, "I know you. I know you better than you know yourself. I am you."

And he throws back his glass in one long gulp before he starts talking.


	4. 72 II

72 II.

Johanna walks into the Victors Banquet alone, dressed in a short, tight, long sleeved black dress with a neckline that cuts down almost to her navel and a dozen viciously sparkling bracelets on each wrist. She looks beautiful and dangerous, and as she plucks a flute of some brightly bubbly concoction off the tray proffered by a passing waiter, he visibly shrinks from her smile.

She looks around the room for Haymitch but doesn't see him among the tinkling, colorful people, all primped and puffed to the limit.

She wanders the space slowly, not talking to anyone, thinking of her own banquet here just a year ago. She wonders if anything would have been different if she had known more. Probably not.

She picks at the heavily laden tables, trying a bite or two of one delicacy after another, but she finds that the food all turns to ash in her mouth. She gets another drink.

A couple of people try to talk to her, but they slink away from her harsh, one word answers and long stretches of silence, and she is left to continue wandering among all the laughing people alone.

She sees the newest victor, Marc she thinks someone told her, and goes up to greet him. That is why she is here after all.

"Congratulations," she tells him, with a blood red smile and dark eyes, "Welcome to the club."

He looks confused and just says thank you uncertainly. He already has enough on his plate.

She sees Finnick – his entrance causes a ripple through the whole room – but has to wait until close to the end of the evening before she can get him alone.

"Care to dance?" she asks coming up to him during a lull in the conversation he was having with some Gamesmakers' silly husband.

"Johanna," he says, his smile wide and open, "looking beautiful as always. There is nothing I would like more."

He leads her out to the dance floor and they do the tight, slow, Capitol dance that the other couples around them are doing.

The evening is slowing down, and people are tiring, but the music still plays smoothly around the couples, wrapping them closer together. Johanna closes the small space between them, almost leaning her head against Finnick's chest, and she whispers, "I'm in. Whatever it is."

"Good." He nods. "Did something change?"

She had told them she needed time to think that night. She doesn't like relying on anyone other than herself, and whatever fledgling rebellion they had managed to pull together seems so directionless and impotent. They were all waiting for something, but they didn't even know what it was. It was unclear how they could pull the anger they had into something that could actually make a difference. Haymitch had been waiting for decades.

"My father's dead."

He pulls back to look at her, his face filled with surprise. "What? But not-" he stops himself, quickly scans the room, and pulls her back to his chest and murmurs into her hair.

"I thought no one else was... interested. For now. Since he. With the hospital and... So why would he..." His words pile on top of each other as he tries to navigate what he can say.

"No. He just died. Natural causes." Her voice is flat, but her eyes are glassy.

"Hey, okay, let's get out of here. Just give me a second."

He pulls her from the dance floor, leaving her in the back of the room while he finds his date, pleads exhaustion from their busy day together, and leaves her with a passionate kiss in front of all of Panem's elite. The woman flushes with pleasure.

"Don't you have a..." Johanna pauses. "A previous engagement?" She asks when he gets back to her, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

"That was earlier. I'm catching the early train tomorrow," he says as he slips back and leads her down a hallway lined with folded tables and carts piled with chafing dishes to a door that leads to the street.

It is late, the town is quiet, and all security has been concentrated at the President's mansion for the party. They walk through the empty streets to a little park that appears like an oasis in the middle of the city and sit on the little bench, hidden in the shadows of the trees.

"So. Tell me what happened," he says when they sit.

"That's it. He died. All on his own." Her hands are clenched in fists in her lap, her bracelets still winking dully in the darkness.

"Johanna..." he says gently, taking one of her hands, prying it open, and slipping it between his.

"He was already dying when I was home," she says. Finnick pulls her closer until their bodies are pressed together along one side, still holding her hand. "He was already dying." And something breaks open inside her and words come spilling out.

"Did you know I was born during the Games?" She looks up at Finnick, then looks back down.

"Yeah, happy birthday to me. I was almost a month early. And I guess the pregnancy was hard? So was the labor. And you know how they have all the mandatory viewings of the games."

"My father was trying to get the midwife since my mother was in trouble, but he was detained by Peacekeepers, and then couldn't find anyone... By the time he got back to her with help, it was too late."

"I survived somehow though, even though I wasn't supposed to." She laughs drily. "Story of my life, huh?"

"I think it destroyed him. But he had a newborn baby and Jasper was only 3 at the time – I know, Jasper and Johanna, it is ridiculous. Alliteration. But my name is the only thing my mother gave me."

"So he had to raise us, and he did. Taught us everything he knew. Fed us. Clothed us. We managed, you know? Just like everyone else did."

"Jasper and I used to get into wicked fights when we were younger. He was bigger than I was, but I always managed to get in the worse hit. And if I cried to Daddy, he was usually the one that got into trouble." She smiles a little at the memory.

"But then I got reaped, and well, we all hate the Games, but it was always so much worse for him, and then to have me gone? But I couldn't really think of anything but myself. I wanted to get back to him, but really... I just wanted to get back."

"I think watching my Games was almost impossible for him. By the time I got back..." Her voice hitches a little. "He looked so much older."

"And you know he must have heard gossip from here. And then. Then Jasper." She fiercely wipes her eyes with her free hand.

"I know he saw what a mess I was. He lost his entire family. He was already dying when I was home."

"And now there is no one left. I have no one. Nothing to lose."

Johanna leans forward, taking her hand back, putting her head in her hands. She takes in a deep breath that she lets out as a groan.

"Dammit, how did you get me to say all of that?" she says after a minute of sitting there, folded over. She runs her hands through her hair before looking over at him, her hair sticking up at crazy angles.

Finnick looks at her quietly for a moment, and then his face breaks into a little grin. "It's the face. No one can say no to this face." He gives her his sweetest look.

She eyes him skeptically but with amusement mixed in too. "Right."

"Don't take this moment of weakness as an invitation to tell your own tragic story," she says after a minute, sitting back up against the bench.

"Of course not Miss Mason. You have my word," he replies, giving her a little salute.

His voice goes soft, "It is tragic though."

She leans her head against his shoulder, shivering slightly, but whether from cold or something else, she is not sure.

"I know," she says quietly.

He takes his suit jacket off, putting it over her shoulders.

"It's really my bare legs that could use some coverage," she says, but she pulls the jacket closer around her.

He stands up, starting to unbutton his pants and doesn't stop until Johanna pulls him back down to the bench, laughing.

"Stop it! Keep your pants on. Of course Finnick Odair doesn't need any excuse to strip down. But stop trying to give me the clothes off your back. Butt. Whatever."

He sits back down next to her, and she scoots into him, sliding her head underneath his arm so that she is resting her head on his chest. She wraps her arms lightly around him.

"Thank you," she whispers into his shirt.

He drops a light kiss onto the top of her head, not saying anything, just holding her a little tighter.

They sit there quietly, just the two of them, and stay there together until the first hints of sunrise start to lighten the sky in front of them, and he has to leave to catch his train.


	5. 73 I

73 I.

Johanna pushes open the heavy, scarred, oak door and walks into the dimly lit bar in the center of District 7. All eyes flick to her as she makes her way over to the bar, but most of the people sitting at the small tables turn back to their drinks when they see who it is.

"Mack," she nods at the man slowly drying glasses behind the counter.

"Johanna." He places a clean glass in front of her and fills it with two fingers of clear brown liquor. She glances up at him questioningly, but he shakes his head "no" as he turns to put the bottle back on the shelf behind him.

She sighs a little in frustration as she takes a sip of her drink. She doesn't know how she is supposed to get a read on the sentiments in the district if people keep refusing to talk to her. This is the third time the head foreman from logging team Northwest 1 has blown her off.

She glances quickly around the room, noting the table off to the left with three guys she has never seen in the place before. They don't look old enough to be in a place like this.

Most of the people she has managed to talk to in the district have been unhappy sure, but scared, and the possibility of getting a District 7 rebel force, however loosely organized, together has been looking unlikely.

Plus, she is getting the feeling that controls on axes and machinery have been getting even tighter recently. Someone may suspect something.

She sighs again, finishing the rest of her drink. Whatever it is the "rebels" are trying to do, she feels like she is failing at it.

"You got any of that soup today Mack?" she asks as he gives her another pour. He nods and goes into the back, his shuffling limp explaining why he isn't in the forests. Spring is starting to warm up the evenings outside, but the hot soup is still satisfying, and she won't have to scrounge something up in her empty house later.

She feels eyes on her and glances back at the table of young 'uns to see three heads turn quickly back to each other. She smiles into her soup when she turns back around.

She finishes her food and drink in silence while people trail in and out of the bar, paying no attention to her. They are used to her prickly presence here.

She stands up to go, throwing a heavy handful of coins down on the bar as she goes.

"Johanna..." Mack begins warningly.

"Relax Mack," she says lightly, "that round for the house was on me."

She understands, but still, the pride of some people. Mack shakes his head, but he still scoops up the coins, putting them into the till. A couple of the patrons within ear shot lift their drinks in wordless thanks.

She goes to head out the door but stops herself, turns, and walks back to the table on the left. She plants herself in front of it, looking at the three guys in front of her. They don't seem to know where to look.

"You," she says to the one in the middle. His eyes snap up, and he mouths "me?" back to her. His hair is slightly redder than hers and lighter, almost bronze, unusual for the district. He is not quite handsome, but there are playful lines around his eyes and there is something nice about the crooked line of his mouth.

"Yeah you," she says, "come with me."

"Come with..." He looks around. "Um... where?"

"Home," she says with an edge of exasperation. "Unless you don't want to."

He looks at his friends, who are trying to hide their grins in their drinks, and then starts hurriedly gathering his things.

"No, I, uh, just. Uh, let me just pay for-"

"Already taken care of," she says breezily and leads him out the door, his friends toasting his receding back behind him.

Mack, back to drying glasses, rolls his eyes as she passes, but she ignores him.

They are barely through her door before she pulls him toward her, kissing him fiercely. He seems a little surprised, but she doesn't think there was any confusion about what they are doing and doesn't feel the need to waste any time.

"Okay..." he says panting a little when she lets him up for air.

She just grins wolfishly at him, backing up towards the stairs to her bedroom, and pulls her shirt over her head.

He had been looking around a little, taking in her house, but now his eyes are trained only on her. He is a little taller than she had expected, with the broad shoulders and strong arms of someone who lifts trees for a living. She pulls him towards her, but now he surprises her, grabbing her firmly and picking her up, rubbing her up the length of his thigh until she is hitched around his waist.

She groans in his ear as he carries her up the stairs and drops her on her back on her bed. She loses herself in this, not thinking about anything else, letting the physical consume her. She thrums under his touch until she can't take any more, and she breaks open with a shuddering moan. He collapses on top of her, pinning her down with his weight in a way that feels solid, real.

She pushes him away, catching her breath.

"That was-" she pauses, still breathing a little hard. "You know what you are doing."

He laughs, picking himself up to look at her. "Thanks? I should probably find your surprise offensive."

"Oh, right. Well, it's a compliment."

"...Ethan," he finishes for her.

"What? Oh. Yeah. Didn't ask." She says, rooting around on the floor for her shirt.

"I know, I am telling you anyway," he says with a smile.

She looks up to see him carefully fingering the blanket that is on the end of her bed.

"Cashmere," she says, nodding at it. "Take it. You can have it."

He looks up at her and starts to laugh, his eyes crinkling. He has a nice laugh.

"Can you imagine? This thing in my house in the Flatlands. It's probably worth more than the whole house."

She just shrugs, gathering his clothes together into a loose bunch but pauses before she pushes them into his lap.

"How old are you anyway?"

"Nineteen. Same as-"

"Same as me," she says over him, but she shakes her head. She feels so much older and she still has over a week until she is actually 19.

She sits back down on the bed, his clothes in her lap, and reaches out to touch the mottled, white skin that runs down the length of his left arm.

"Oh, that," he says. "Strap broke once, loading the logs onto the transport truck. Turns out you have to move for the trees, they won't move for you." He gives her a crooked smile.

She seems to be turning that over in her mind, then looks down at the clothes in her lap and finishes giving them back to him.

He gets the message.

"Oh, I see, it's 'love 'em and leave 'em' eh, Miss Mason?" But he says it with that same crooked smile. She wonders what it would take to faze this guy.

"You know your way-" She stops and starts again. "Help yourself to anything – everything – in the kitchen."

He looks back at her as he finishes buttoning his shirt.

"Please," she says, because she means it.

He seems to know that she doesn't say please very often.

* * *

><p>She is awakened in the morning by an insistent ringing that is coming from somewhere in the house.<p>

She stumbles down the stairs, shaking off her strange dreams of ringing alarms that started every time she touched anything, leaving her weaponless and helpless in a sea of… something, and picks up the phone.

"Hello?" She has no idea who could be calling her, but it probably is not a good sign.

"Johanna!" The voice on the other end is bright and loud.

"Finnick?" She looks at the phone in confusion as if it could provide answers. "Wha- Why are you-"

"Hi! How are you doing?" Finnick cuts her off, his voice too bright and stretched tight, breakable.

"Seriously, what is-"

"So excited for this year's Games, right?"

She looks at the phone again. She feels like her brain is moving at half speed.

"I know I am. And! Annie is coming this year! Special request from the President. Big honor. She is so excited."

The effort in his voice is so palpable she can almost feel it through the telephone handset.

"Your Ann- uh, kidding," she covers quickly. "Is she mentoring?"

"Hopefully! President Snow certainly would love her to!"

Johanna doesn't know how much longer she can listen to him talk like this.

"Right, I, uhh," she doubles over still holding the phone, trying to think through what this means, and what she can say. "Can't wait to meet her. And, uh, see you guys? I want to hear... everything..."

"Is there anything, um, else I can do? For you?" She asks after a tense pause, then makes a face because it sounds so stupid.

"No." She can hear him take a deep breath on the other end of the phone. "No. I am not sure why I even called. I just needed to... tell someone."

"Well of course. It is such big news. It'll be fine. Great. We'll figure it out. It'll be fine."

"Yeah. Yeah. I know." His voice is getting ragged at the edges. "Thanks. It'll be nice to see you."

"Yeah. Same."

They both pause awkwardly, not knowing what else to say.

"Well, I need to get going," he says finally.

"Right, of course. Um, see you both soon, I guess."

"So. Bye," she says haltingly as she goes to hang up the phone.

She stares at it a second, then rips it off the wall with a feral yell.

They don't know the rules to this game, but it looks like President Snow is winning.

* * *

><p>They are all gathered together in the viewing room on the train watching the reapings when Johanna sees Annie for the first time since her Victory Tour.<p>

She is sitting on the stage next to Finnick in the background of the District 4 shot, but when the camera cuts back to the mentors after the District 4 tributes are announced, it is Mags who is sitting there, not Annie.

Johanna does a double take, but no one else in the room seems to notice. Most likely they were noticing the size of that female tribute, just like everyone else who was watching.

Johanna hopes this means that Annie isn't going to be in the Capitol after all, but deep down she knows that whatever Annie's mental or physical state, she is going be there.

Johanna can never sleep on the train, but this year seems worse. Worse even than the year of her own games. At least then she had a strategy, knew who the enemy was, and knew what had to be done to beat them. Now she feels like she is fighting on an ever increasing number of fronts, and everything is out of her control.

Her tribute this year is so small and young and terrified and the daughter of two schoolteachers. Schoolteachers! The girl has never even seen an axe, let alone held one, and she seems even more terrified of Johanna than she is of the Games. It is not helping matters.

When they finally get to the Capitol, it is all Johanna can do not to run to the 4th floor to try and find Finnick immediately, but she knows that they all have more than enough to do before the Games without her causing some sort of scandal of collusion between mentors.

She stays put.

* * *

><p>"Look brainless, you are going to have to figure out a strategy better than sniveling through your interviews! You can only pull that off if you something to back it up once you are actually in the arena, and so far, you haven't shown me anything!"<p>

Johanna stalks out of the room, slamming the door behind her as her tribute dissolves into yet another round of tears.

She runs into Silas in the hallway, who is apparently having an easier time with his tribute. He just raises a grizzled eyebrow at her before telling her that lunch is in an hour and the tributes have to go to the stylists after that.

"And take it a little easy on her," he says, nodding toward the closed door. "You are one of the last people in the world she is going to see."

Johanna visibly slumps a little as she takes that in before straightening back up to make an obscene gesture at Silas' retreating form.

"Like you were so easy on me," she mutters to herself. "You couldn't even pretend to give a shit."

* * *

><p>She runs into Haymitch on the elevator to the mentor room before the start of the Games.<p>

He shakes his head almost imperceptibly as she walks in.

"Have you seen my newest toy?" she asks, pulling a small cube from her pocket. "It's the newest portable speaker system from 3. You can sync it with all your music chips. Gift from a fan. I thought I might liven up the mentor room this year."

"You have fans?" he mutters.

"Dick. My winning charm makes me quite popular." Her lips curve in a smile while her eyes shoot daggers at him.

"Check it out." She runs a finger along one edge and an absurdly upbeat instrumental comes streaming loudly out of the cube.

"Nothing?" She whispers under the music, not looking at him. "You always know everyone's secrets. What about Annie?"

"Nothing," he whispers back, also looking straight ahead. "What about Northwest 1?"

"No go. She wouldn't talk. Basically I have squat."

They are getting close, so she turns the music back off.

"You are going to be quite popular in the mentor room with that one, sweetheart," Haymitch drawls to her.

"How are your tributes?" She asks as the elevator doors ding and open on their floor.

"Starved. Terrified. Career fodder." He says emotionlessly. "You?"

"Same."

And she opens the door to the mentor room, loud with the voices of the other mentors lining up sponsors, and lit with the glow of a dozen huge television screens tuned to the 12 empty plates surrounding the Cornucopia in the center of the newest arena. They head to their respective stations, girding themselves mentally for the 73rd Hunger Games.


	6. 73 II

73 II.

Johanna sits on the floor of the viewing room on the 4th floor, idly twirling the dull training knife she commandeered from the training room between her fingers while she carefully watches the back of the tall girl standing at the window.

The Games are far from over, but Johanna doesn't have any more duties in them, so she is sitting here, silently sharing the same room as Annie and wondering if the crazy girl is ever going to speak.

The memories of Johanna's strategy are still fresh in people's minds, so her sniffling tribute was among the first targeted by the Careers, and she was gone before the first day was over. Again.

She wonders how many more deaths are going to pile up on her shoulders before she has to drink as much as Haymitch just to get through each day. Or goes crazy like the girl in front of her.

She tries to spin the knife all the way around two of her fingers and back into her hand, but only gets it halfway around one before the knife clatters loudly to the ground.

Annie turns quickly around from the window, and Johanna follows her gaze to the blade on the floor. Johanna looks at Annie warily, not sure what the other girl is going to do. She wonders if the sight of a knife could bring about a breakdown, and berates herself internally for pulling it out of her boot. But what was she supposed to do? Annie had looked right through Johanna when she walked in and hadn't said anything in the half hour that they had been in the same room together.

Annie comes over and picks up the knife, and before Johanna can say anything, spins it expertly around three fingers and twirls it fully around in her palm before slipping it down against her leg where a sheath no doubt always used to be.

She smiles sheepishly at Johanna, who is looking at her with wide eyes. Of course Annie is a victor too, and from a Career district no less, but Johanna had always assumed that she was weak. She had won by accident.

Annie's Games are almost never replayed – she is pretty sure more than one Gamesmaker lost his life over them – but now Johanna remembers the girl from the very beginning of the Games, who protected her District partner with impressive and deadly knife skills.

"I forgot you were knives," Johanna says to her as Annie hands back the knife. "When did you learn to do that?"

Annie shrugs. "There is a lot of time out on a boat. Especially when you are waiting for the fish."

Her voice is softer, more musical than it ever was on television.

"And it's because I was swimming, not knives."

Johanna looks at her in amazement for the second time in as many minutes. Was that a joke? About her own Games?

"Just how crazy are you?" Johanna asks bluntly.

"Oh, I'm crazy," Annie responds, still serene, "but we all have our roles to play, right?"

Johanna looks at her appraisingly, then looks back to the wall in front of them and hurls the knife at it from her sitting position. The dull point wedges into the wood for a second before it falls harmlessly to the ground.

"Right."

Just then two Peacekeepers are led into the room by an Avox, looking for Annie. One of them looks to the knife on the ground, looks at Johanna's challenging glare, and seems to decide to unsee the knife.

"What are the jackasses in white doing here?" Johanna asks Annie while glaring at the Peacekeepers in front of her.

They visibly stiffen but don't do anything.

"Oh, they are here to take me to the hospital," Annie says breezily. "President Snow said they were working on some sort of procedure to try and alter memories? They think they might be able to help me. Be less crazy." She smiles at Johanna at this last line.

"It is ostensibly the reason for my being here," Annie finishes, while grabbing her coat off the couch.

Johanna looks between her and the Peacekeepers and then at the walls in shock. That sounded remarkably like she didn't think that President Snow had her best interests at heart.

"I am sure it is," Johanna says, giving her a significant look. "Everyone wants to see you better." She has to pause on the last word. There is no better, she had told herself.

"Oh yes, I know," Annie says, still light, as she walks out with her guards.

Johanna stares for a minute at the empty doorway.

So that's Annie Cresta. Finnick's love. She shakes her head as she picks herself up and follows their lead out the door.

* * *

><p>"That bitch is crazy."<p>

Johanna is sitting on a couch in the mentor room, Finnick's feet in her lap. His eyes are closed and his arm is flung over his face.

She isn't supposed to be in the room, only mentors with tributes are allowed to be there, and it is only the boy from District 1 and the girl from District 4 who are left. But Jet is trying to catch some sleep while his tribute does, and Mags doesn't care. She is monitoring their also sleeping tribute while Finnick is supposed to be napping.

"Annie? Yeah. That's kind of what she is known for." Finnick's eyes are still closed, and his voice sounds tired.

Johanna absently starts to massage one of the feet in her lap.

"Yeah..." she says thoughtfully. "She isn't what I expected."

"We never are," Finnick just says, quietly, while poking his other foot into her hands. She drops them both as if she just realized what she was doing.

"Oh c'mon, please? Just for a minute," he says lifting his hand to show her his puppy dog eyes. Johanna harrumphs formidably, but picks up his foot again.

She has a thousand questions swirling around in her head but knows it isn't safe to ask any of them.

"They are trying to alter her memories?" she asks finally.

Finnick takes a deep breath before he says anything.

"Yeah... I don't really get it. They think maybe they can make her feel less strongly about her Games. Or try to root out these false memories she has of things she did. Her brain just starts to... spin out sometimes. Like it can't cope, and starts spitting out and stringing together all the horrible things she has seen in new ways."

Johanna doesn't say anything else. They both know what terrifying uses memory altering capabilities could be put to in the hands of the Capitol. On the other hand, there are more than a few things Johanna thinks she would like to forget forever.

"We'll have to visit the Palace later," Johanna says quietly. That nickname had stuck from Johanna's first visit to the abandoned building.

"Mmhmm."

Finnick's breathing starts to slow. Johanna sits there a little longer, rubbing his feet. The room and the arena shown on the television screens are both quiet.

She finally stealthily slips out from under his legs and walks over to drop a kiss on his forehead.

"Goodnight, Sleeping Beauty," she whispers.

She smiles to herself when she hears the _thunk_ of a half-heartedly thrown shoe hitting the doorframe as the door to the room closes behind her.

* * *

><p>There is a letter on the floor of her room when she gets back, and the mere sight of the heavy paper and embossed seal makes her heart jump into her throat.<p>

The next evening she is back in the Presidential mansion, and the president is looking at her from the other side of his heavy, ornate wood desk. District 7 handiwork, she is almost positive.

She stands casually, carefully cleaning the nail beds on her right hand and not making eye contact with him.

"We have an assignment for you," he says, his voice smooth and oily.

Johanna's eyes flick up, surprised.

"You seem to forget that you kil-, that I no longer have any family," she spits back at him. "No one left to hurt me with."

"There is a..." President Snow pauses and looks to an assistant that Johanna hadn't even noticed sitting in the corner.

The assistant consults the folder in her hand.

"Hargrove comma Ethan," the woman says in her pitched Capitol accent.

Johanna looks at her in confusion.

President Snow sighs as he presses a series of buttons on a panel that Johanna can't see from her vantage point. The wall to her left flashes to reveal that it is actually one large television screen. A series of images and screens flash on the wall until it finally reveals a picture of the interior of her own doorway in District 7.

"Are you just letting me know that you are monitoring my house in Victor's Village?" Johanna asks sharply. "Because that isn't exactly news."

She is about to go back to inspecting her nails when she sees the door open, and she stumbles into the picture, attached at the lips to a tall, almost-red head. She suddenly understands.

The video is still playing on the wall, and she watches herself back up towards the camera while taking her shirt off.

"As delightful as it is to watch you get your rocks off watching me, this is a little boring. I already know what happens. Is there a point to all of this?"

The president just smiles and pauses the video, making it smaller and pushing it into the corner of the screen. He pulls up what looks like a live feed of the truck depot in Northwest 3. It is silent, but she can easily pick out Ethan laughing with a couple of other people as they gather their things to leave for the night.

Her blood runs cold, but she keeps her voice steady.

"I don't get why you are showing me this," she says. "You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I give a shit what you do to this guy, but I really don't. Kill him this second for all I care."

She keeps her face an impassive mask even though she thinks everyone in the room must be able to hear her heart beating. She should have known better than to drag anyone else into her web of death and destruction, especially so obviously. She knows everything she touches turns to shit. She is usually smarter than this.

President Snow eyes her carefully, then looks away, fussily wiping the corners of his oversized lips with an embroidered handkerchief.

Johanna breathes a little easier, allowing herself one covert glance at the feed on the wall while the president looks down between his steepled fingers. Ethan is still laughing.

The president looks back up, clearly moving on to a new tactic.

"Experimental medicine is so tricky," he says, the same slippery smile from before on his lips. "Sometimes it works miracles, but sometimes it makes the patients much worse. Especially the mind. So difficult to understand."

Johanna looks up at him horror.

"Give me the name," she says flatly after a minute, but new fire burns in her eyes.

The president smiles benignly at her. "I am glad we finally understand each other, my dear."

Johanna heads out of the mansion, lost in thought and looking at the heavy card with the man's name and address that she is twirling absently between her hands. She doesn't notice when she almost walks into a figure heading in.

"Johanna," Cashmere nods after a surprised second. The victors from Districts 1 and 2 never socialized that much with the others, but there was still a bond between all of them from being in the same rarified group.

"Cashmere," Johanna nods back. "Ha! The president really crams these appointments right together, huh?"

"Well, don't want to keep his Presidency waiting." Johanna says after the two of them stare silently at each other for a moment. She sweeps grandly aside, waving her card a little.

Cashmere looks at the younger girl, then looks grimly down the length of the hallway in front of her, her mouth set and her shoulders square.

* * *

><p>Finnick and Johanna are in the basement of the Palace, sitting on a threadbare couch that someone managed to drag down there, waiting for Haymitch, Chaff, Beetee, and Heather.<p>

Another fruitless discussion of how to organize things in the districts and ideas about what might cause people to band together for the greater good no doubt awaits them, Johanna thinks to herself, but it seems to make people feel better just to talk about it. Besides, the stories about how things are in the different districts are always fascinating. Heather's stories about the textile factories in District 8 almost made the saw mills sound like a paradise.

The Games are over, and the boy from District 1 now being made presentable for the adoring Capitol public.

He must have had a name once, but everyone calls him Silver (an equally stupid District 1 name in Johanna's view) because of the silvery grey streaks already coming through his otherwise white blond hair. It only made him more striking looking and was already sparking a new hair trend throughout the Capitol.

Johanna is sitting wedged into the corner of the couch, more fidgety than usual and quieter.

"Annie's gone?" She finally asks to break the silence.

"Yeah. Back to District 4 hopefully no worse for the wear. It appears she fulfilled her purpose. Making sure I always know who is in charge." He rubs the bridge of his nose tiredly.

"Yeah, what was that about?"

"He wanted me to come to the Capitol in the winter. But my sister was sick, and I didn't want to leave Annie, and I was already going to be here to mentor... The president let me know he was not pleased."

"Yeah..." she says quietly, hugging her arms around herself.

"Where the hell is Haymitch anyway?" She asks, getting a little bit more of her old spark back in her voice. "That drunk bastard finished every last bottle that was in here. He better be bringing something with him."

"You think he would leave himself in an alcohol free room for more than an hour? That would be like me wearing a shirt on consecutive days."

He gives Johanna a saucy wink, but she only smiles wanly in return. His look turns concerned.

"Hey," he says, moving closer to her, "what's going on with you? You haven't said a bitchy thing to me in days."

She looks up at him and tries to muster a sarcastic comment but ends up just sighing.

"We all have our roles to play…" she says quietly, remembering Annie.

Finnick just looks at her, waiting.

"It's nothing," she says. "I just had an... appointment. I'll be back to bitching you out soon enough." She can't complain about this, not to him.

But he looks at her, surprised and worried.

"But..." he is looking at her, mind whirling, and you don't get to be a victor without being able to quickly pick out people's weaknesses.

"No. Not... Annie?"

She just shrugs. She can't talk about it.

"Oh no... Jo..." his voice is so soft, and his eyes pools of worry.

"No," she says, sitting up now, anger in her tone. "Don't do that. Don't 'Jo' me. You don't get to do that. Not you."

He had been going to reach for her, but now he sits back.

"No, right, you're right. I'm sorry." He is looking at his hands, which are clenching and unclenching in his lap.

"It's fine. Just leave me alone for once."

"Okay." He has to hold himself back from reaching out to her. "Just. Johanna. I am so... Sorry."

"No, fuck you Finnick!" She can feel hot tears pricking at her eyes. "Fuck you..." Her vision is blurred from the tears swimming in her eyes, making hot tracks down her cheeks. "Stop..."

But she can't say anything more, just lets a few more tears fall, and the next thing she knows, he is right next to her, so close, gently wiping the tears from her face with his fingers.

She looks up at him, and she knows that she is completely unguarded, but she can't do anything about it. And his green eyes are so worried, so sad, and they look into hers and see her completely. That underneath it all, she is just a girl, barely nineteen, alone and scared.

Suddenly, she feels the warmth of his body on top of hers, and feels his mouth, hot and insistent, covering her own. She is stretched out with him on top of her, and she can feel the hard edge of the wood in the couch arm pressing through the cheap, thin upholstery covering it and into her upper back. His fingers have found the strip of skin exposed between her loose sweater and the top of her pants and are slowly tracing up her back, leaving trails of fire burning on her skin in their wake.

There is a fumbling at the door, and Johanna and Finnick spring away from each other instantly, guiltily, the muffled voice of Haymitch making fun of Chaff for struggling with the door breaking the spell that had come over the room. Johanna wipes quickly at her mouth and her eyes, hoping she doesn't look as completely unsettled as she feels, consciously avoiding looking at Finnick, who is running a hand through his hair and looking at the floor anyway.

"Break it up kids, the adults are here," Chaff's voice booms into the room as he gets the door open, the bag in his hand explaining why it took him a couple extra seconds.

Johanna springs up from the couch as the other three stream into the room, quickly pulling her sweater back down as she does.

"What the hell took you guys so long?" Johanna scowls in Chaff's general direction as she eyes the bag in his hands.

"There better be liquor in there," she says threateningly as she drags a chair from the corner closer to the table. "You two drunks finished off every last drop that was in here."

"Charming as always Miss Mason," Chaff says as he drops the bag with a clink onto the table, then sweeps her up with his good arm and plants a kiss on her mouth.

"Ugh, there isn't enough liquor in the world to make that happen," she says as she overdramatically wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

She nods at Beetee, who has already sat down at the table and pulled out some sort of electronic contraption that he is quietly fiddling with, apparently setting it up. Finnick rises from the couch with a quick shake of his head and brings over two more chairs, pulling one out for Heather gallantly before sitting next to Beetee and looking curiously at the mess of circuit boards in front of him.

"You realize your sweater is mostly see through," Haymitch says to Johanna as he drops his own bag of bottles onto the table.

"You realize you look like something a wild animal has chewed on and spat back up," Johanna shoots back, smiling sweetly.

Chaff guffaws loudly as they all sit down and the talking begins.

* * *

><p>Johanna walks quickly through Capitol, heading back to the Training Center alone and turning over the events of the meeting she just left.<p>

As suspected, it was mostly a lot of talking mixed with a healthy amount of drinking, but Haymitch did have more information from Plutarch about other disgruntled Capitol citizens who were sympathetic to their cause and possible ways to contact them. Everyone had ideas for their own districts, the idea being that if the people of the districts could control their industries, the Capitol would have to succumb to their demands. Government control of the Capitol was sure to break down the second the people couldn't get everything they wanted the second they wanted it.

Johanna wonders how many people will actually be willing to die if and when it comes down to it. At least District 7 is large, and people have access to machinery and things that could be used as weapons through their work. She wonders what people are going to do in the other districts, attack Peacekeepers with sewing needles and kitchen knives?

The pile of circuit boards in front of Beetee turned out to be a new silent audio jammer that he was working on that would be able to mask their conversations from any bugs. When he started talking about perfectly canceling waves, Johanna immediately zoned out and turned to her drink. The key point was that he thought he could have versions for everyone ready in a couple of months.

Lost in thought about where the best places to stand would be to not be shot by a camera recording two people talking silently to each other, she doesn't notice the sound of someone coming up behind her until it is almost too late.

She spins quickly with a vicious knee up that is easily blocked by Finnick's crossed wrists.

"Losing your reflexes," he says with a grin.

She doesn't say anything, turning back around to continue walking. He falls into step next to her.

"Look, I..." He starts slowly, talking to the impassive side of Johanna's face.

She stops suddenly and spins toward him, instantly fully charged.

"No, you look." They are facing each other in the middle of a mostly empty street, blocks away from the Training Center.

"You can't _fuck_ your way out of everything. That isn't what people do. That isn't what _we_ do. I love you, I do, but not like that. You're a pretty boy disaster with your tragic love story and your Capitol secrets, and you might be even more fucked up than I am under that fake seductive voice!"

Her voice had risen steadily while she was talking, and now they both look around to make sure no one could have heard them. They hear the telltale boot tread of a Peacekeeper, so they both start walking toward the Training Center again as casually as they can.

"That isn't what this is about," she ends quietly.

They walk together silently for a block before Finnick finally turns to her.

"You're right," he says quietly. "I'm sorry."

They keep walking, Finnick mulling over Johanna's words in his head. He thinks about who he is, the things he does, the things he has done. He was so young when he won, he wonders to himself if even knows how normal people react to things. Not that Johanna is normal.

"Plus," he says, turning to her again with a smile, "if I knew you were going to tell me you loved me after just one kiss, I never would have done it. Sometimes I just don't know my own strength."

"Ugh. _Plus_ you are insufferable. And the insistence on not wearing shirts!"

"I am currently wearing multiple shirts!" He says indignantly as he pulls the collar of a white tee shirt out from under the soft thermal he has on.

She laughs a little as they enter the training center and get on the elevator.

He hugs her before he gets off on the fourth floor.

"I love you too you know," he whispers into the top of her head.

"I know," she says quietly in his shoulder.

"Of course you do," she says more loudly, flashing him an evil grin. "How could you not?"

She smiles at him as the elevator doors close, then reaches for her side, where she can still feel the burning paths his fingers traced onto her bare skin.


	7. 74 I

74 I.

Her tribute is good this year. Maybe not win the whole thing good, but at least good enough to get out of the Cornucopia, and at this point, Johanna would take that as a success.

The girl was good with her axes and had the kind of hard scrabble existence that was useful practice for these games. She only got a four as her training score, which had left Johanna confused, but she figured it was better to score lower and perform higher than the other way around.

So she felt like she had a job to do in the Mentor Room for perhaps the first time and pulled what charm she could muster together to do just that. As she sat at her station, watching the girl on the plate on the screen in front of her, she was filled with a sense of purpose beyond just watching children hack into each other.

She doesn't understand why she wants her tribute to win, not when she knows what waits for anyone who gets to the other side. She tells herself it is because she needs another person to mentor with her because the walls that she is building up watching her tributes die year after year is starting to scare even her. But there is something else. A deep, pulsing, need to win maybe. The same need that got her to where she is now. There is something dark about it that she can't think too deeply about.

On the screen in front of her, the girl jumps off the plate, grabbing the knife closest to her, and going for the pack a little closer to the actual horn. Johanna could see her eyeing the ax that was even closer, just a little out of reach and willed her to leave it behind, to run.

Johanna sees the boy from 8 lock eyes on her, spear in hand a second before her tribute does, but the girl sees him. She has her knife and knows how to use it. But there is a split second where the girl looks the other child in the face and hesitates, knife raised, and that is all it takes.

Johanna lets out a harsh scream of frustration as her tribute falls to the ground, takes off her shoe and buries the heel two inches into the small screen on the control panel in front of her, letting out a small shower of glass and sparking electronics, as she stands up to walk away.

She yells at Finnick, who's eyes had snapped up to her when she yelled and is still looking calmly at her standing on one heel, at Fuller, the mentor from District 8, at Haymitch who had quietly drawled _you're going to have to pay for that, sweetheart_, from across the room.

"Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you!" Before kicking her other shoe across the room and stomping out of the room in bare feet.

She can just hear Cecilia's mild "What was that about?" as the door closes behind her, and she knocks over the stupid little side table that is sitting uselessly outside of the elevator bank.

They must have seen something in the girl, those ruthless Gamesmakers, something that would make them think that she was going to hesitate when it mattered most. Something that made her... human. Johanna hangs her head as her breathing slows and the adrenaline starts to work its way out of her bloodstream. The cheerful ding of the arriving elevator doesn't fit with the horror that is going on behind the closed doors behind her. The girl never would have made it.

Nobody good can survive.

* * *

><p>Days later she is still in the Capitol, slowly going crazy alone.<p>

She wants to leave, to go back to the cold comforts of District 7, but Haymitch had told her to stay, that he had something important to tell her. She isn't sure what he is playing at with the love story angle that his tributes are working, but she has to admit to herself that his girl looks good. She wonders what it would be like to have Haymitch actually bring a winner home to District 12. Better or worse than letting them die out there alone while the entire country watches? She isn't sure how she got to this place, sitting in a plush room and shepherding children to their deaths. All she did was survive.

She hates being in the Capitol when there isn't anything to distract her, and she hasn't been able to sleep for more than a couple of hours in a row for days. The darkest thoughts always come out at night. She already went to the training room and ran for an hour, then threw axes at the training targets until she couldn't lift her arms any more, but her mind still won't let her exhausted body sleep.

So she is still awake, quietly whittling an intricate carved snake around a walking stick no one will use, when there is a light tap at her door, even though it is so late it is basically early.

She opens it hesitantly to find Finnick leaning against the doorframe, looking down at her with half a smile on his lips.

"Didn't wake you, did I?"

She raises one eyebrow as she looks him up and down. The green-gold makeup sweeping from his eyes to his temples is smudged and running down one side of his face, failing to cover up the tired bags under his eyes. He is wearing an unbuttoned, wrinkled, checked shirt that clashes horribly with the metallic, dark green pants he is wearing, and the hand that isn't supporting his weight against the door is trembling slightly. There is something unfocused about his eyes.

"Well look what the cat dragged in," Johanna says slowly, taking him in. "You look like garbage."

Finnick barks out a laugh.

"You certainly know how to make a guy feel good about himself."

Johanna raises her eyebrow even further, still just looking at him.

"You have a bathtub in your room, right?" Finnick asks her silence. "I was wondering if I could use it. I normally use Mags', but Marina is here this year instead, and I don't want to bother her..."

"Of course not. But feel free to come barging in here at some unholy hour," Johanna says while opening the door wider to let him in.

She realizes then that he is leaning against the doorframe not casually but because it looks like he might not be able to stand without its help. She moves in quickly under his arm to help him in as he starts to walk gingerly into her room, wincing a little as he does.

"What the hell Odair?" Johanna's voice fills with concern as the slowly navigate their way across her room to the bathroom. "Are you okay? What the hell happened to you?"

"I'm fine," Finnick says curtly. "Just need a bath. Wash this stuff off of my face."

"Did you take a healant? I think I have a painkiller around here somewhere…"

She sits Finnick down on the edge of the tub and starts rifling through drawers in the bathroom.

"No, I have too much other stuff in my system right now," Finnick says, head in his hands, mostly to the floor. "I took a flush to get it all out, but I have to wait at least an hour before I take anything else." His voice speaks of experience.

Johanna looks at him carefully but just goes over to the tub control panel and pushes some buttons to make it start filling.

"Okay, well, you know how to work that thing, right?" she says as she heads back out the door. "The towels on the rack are clean. Knock yourself out."

"Jo?" His voice stops her before she can get all the way out the door. He looks at the slowly filling tub as if he is thinking about just getting in with his clothes still on.

"I can't get out of these ridiculous pants Havan laced me into."

She watches him slowly shrug his way out of his shirt, lifting his arms as little as possible. The shoulders and arms he reveals are streaked with angry red welts, and there are more down his back, mixed with vicious scratches that are oozing beads of dark red blood.

"Shit," Johanna breathes quietly, but she catches herself as Finnick flicks his eyes up to hers and her tone changes. "I just have to do everything around here, huh? 'Wake up Johanna.' 'Draw me a bath Johanna.' 'Take off my pants Johanna.'"

Her voice is high and mocking, but she carefully stands Finnick up, facing away from her, and starts undoing and loosening the thin, gold rope lacing that is running up and down the length of his pants.

"As if," he winces again as she starts working his pants down, "this isn't your idea of a dream job."

She takes in a sharp breath when she sees the bruises that are already starting to bloom out from his inner thighs and the scratches that continue beneath his pants, but she manages to hold back the _what the hell are they doing to you?_ that almost escapes her lips. She knows what they are doing to him. Continuing to control those who managed to escape the constant threat of starvation. What they are doing to any of them.

She feels better after he carefully lowers himself into the tub, hiding his broken body from her, and closes his eyes. She wonders when this hour is going to be up so they can start fixing him back up again.

She gets up to go again, but he calls her back with the same voice he used before. He sounds younger.

"Can you stay with me?"

She hates it. She hates seeing him like this and wants to wait until the Capitol drugs have fixed him back up, until he is back to being himself, but she finds herself sitting back down on the floor of her bathroom. She leans her back against the dark stone tiles, a little rough and flecked with hidden bits of gold, that surround the bathtub.

She had marveled the first time she was in this training center at the beauty of these tiles, inside the bathrooms of the rooms they had created for people they were just going to send to their deaths. It was such a small thing to wonder at with everything else going on, but she couldn't help it. She loves things that are beautiful and well designed and these were more beautiful than anything she had ever seen in 7.

She can't handle the silence that is filling the space between them, heavy with dark, unsaid thoughts.

"You don't have a tub?" She asks after a minute.

"Nope. No tub." His eyes are still closed and he hasn't moved at all, but she thinks she sees his shoulders relax a little in the hot water. His breathing is shallow and he still seems coiled and tense.

She sits up on the edge of the tub and dips the small cloth that she grabs from the rack next to her into the soapy water. She starts to carefully wipe the makeup covering his face off, revealing the tired, grey skin underneath.

"Don't you have a team of people to do this sort of shit for you?" she says as she rinses the cloth out with cool water and places it across his eyes. She tries to sound exasperated but can't quite make it.

He just smiles a little. His forehead is still wrinkled but whether from physical pain or memories, she can't tell.

She leans over to drain some of the water out of the tub and turns the tap on so that the steady tinkling noise of the water fills the room. She perches back up, cross legged on the small ledge area at the foot of tub, presses a button for some shampoo and starts working it into Finnick's hair.

"The things I do for you," she sighs. "Don't tell anyone."

"Wouldn't dare," he says, leaning back into her touch.

"Tell me something," she says, leaning against the wall behind her.

"Something," he repeats slowly.

"Anything. Tell me about Annie."

"Annie?" He turns his face up as if to look at her, but she moves it firmly back into place. "What about her?"

"Anything," she says, massaging his scalp.

"Annie..." he says quietly and is silent for a minute. His face relaxes though, and Johanna scoops a little water up through his hair, satisfied with herself.

"Did you know her before?"

He is quiet, then slips easily out from under her hands and into the water. When he comes back up, he looks more like himself again, as if being submerged in water, even soapy water scented with lavender and pine, brings him back home.

He sinks back down so that his chin is level with the water.

"No, not really. I mean, I knew of her. She was one of the best divers in the district. Our family boats would pull into the same unloading dock every once in a while. But not really. Especially after I won. I didn't go out on the boat with my father as often any more, and... People pull away from Victors." He says the word with a capital V.

"As well they should. You know how it is. People pull away, you push them away, you become Other... Plus I had so much Capitol stink all over me."

Johanna is nodding a little to herself, and goes to drain more water and turn the tap up a little more. No need to get themselves in even more trouble.

"It is easier to let them hate you. To let them think you are disgusting. Exactly as you seem."

"What the hell is this?" she interrupts him. "The Odair sob-fest? If I had known you were going to be a whiny bitch, I would have left you out in the hall."

Finnick closes his eyes and smiles at the wall in front of him.

"You know she is the only tribute I have brought home?"

Her eyes narrow, thinking. "No, that can't be right. What about-"

"Nope, that was Kyle and Marina's year."

"Huh," Johanna sits back down on the floor, leaning back so that their heads are level with each other, but looking off in different directions. "Well I better tell Silas that we are supposed to be desperately in love. Just what I need, some shriveled old logger dick."

Finnick starts to laugh, but stops, winces, and coughs a little.

"Nah, he didn't really like you as a tribute, he certainly doesn't like you now."

"'Didn't really like me'? I don't think he could have picked me out of a lineup if everyone else was from District 11!"

She hasn't ever forgiven Silas for ignoring her during her Games, even if it was her strategy.

"Yeah, well that was kind of your game, Miss Mason. Besides, it isn't like that. It's not duty," he says thoughtfully.

"I..." he pauses, sinking down deeper into the water for a second. "You know when you see something you hate about yourself in someone else? And it makes you hate them? She is like the opposite of that. The things I hate about myself, she doesn't have, she has the opposite."

"We- I..." he struggles for the words. "What does it mean to be a victor, really? It means that when it comes down to it, you would rather _murder_," he hisses the word quietly, "twenty three other innocent children than die. And for me, that transition took all of the 60 seconds that I stood on that plate staring at the Cornucopia. That is why I don't correct the people in the districts who hate me, who think I am an animal. I am. They are right."

"You and I are the same Jo. We are all victors and everything that implies."

Johanna absorbs this like a physical blow, but she is nothing if not good at taking hits. And she knows he is right.

"Letting them do this to you doesn't atone for your sins, Finn," she says quietly.

"And what choice do they give us? What it means to be a victor is that we are survivors. This world, this fucked up world, doesn't give you any choice!" she is investing the words with all violence she can while keeping her voice under the sound of the running water. "Maybe Four is different, but where I come from, if you lose your will to survive for a second, they'll take you and everything you love too!"

"I know," he says wearily. "I know."

She rears back, readying a hit of her own.

"Loving her doesn't make you less crazy," she says quietly but sharply. "Loving her isn't going to make her less crazy."

He only repeats _I know_, quietly into the bubbles.

When he doesn't hit back, the fight drains out of her. Suddenly she is so tired, exhausted, and all she can think about is getting to her bed. This life that they are leading, made to seem like they have everything when in reality they have nothing, control over nothing, not even their own bodies, is exhausting. She knows that the man sitting behind her, broken and beaten because he can't lose another thing that he loves, is the only person who sees who she really is, ugly and twisted, and she is the only person who sees him, ugly and twisted and beautiful too.

She thinks maybe that to really love someone like she knows Finnick and Annie love each other, you can't see the other person for what they really are. You have to be a little delusional about how good and perfect the other one is. She and Finnick see each other too clearly for that, but there is value in that too.

"Is that hour up yet?" she asks quietly. A truce maybe.

He lifts his arm gingerly, testing it, then rubs his temples.

"Close enough," he says. "There is a healant in my shirt pocket."

She goes to get it, magical Capitol medicine reserved for those who won't ever, can't ever, feel any pain, can't let their bodies show weakness. She shakes one of the sparkling blue pills (even their medicine is gaudy) into her palm along with a painkiller from her stash and brings them to Finnick with a glass of water.

"Please fix yourself," she says as she hands it all over, as close as she can get to apologizing. "I can't handle seeing you like this."

"Aw Jo, if I didn't know better, I would think you care," he says as he swallows down the pills.

"Shut up," she says scrubbing a hand through her short hair. "Now I don't know what you are doing, but I have to go to bed."

He stands up shakily, suddenly looking just as exhausted as she feels, and wraps a towel around himself. She knows that these medicines take a lot of you, and she doesn't even want to know what kind of night Finnick had leading up to this. She takes his arm again and maneuvers him out of the bathroom and sits him on the edge of her bed, then grabs a pair of shorts she had taken from him ages ago and throws them at him.

"I'm not carrying you back downstairs," she says.

"Are you propositioning me?" He tries to pull out his seduction voice, but his eyelids keep drooping shut.

"Yup," she says, taking off her clothes and pulling on loose pants and an oversized t-shirt. "And this is my best outfit."

She climbs around him into the bed, curling up into the corner.

"Goodnight," she says sleepily. "Don't get any ideas."

He crawls under the covers next to her, facing away, turning out the lights as he does.

"Finn?" she says softly, right before they both fall asleep. "You're right. We are the same."

He just mumbles quietly, the words unintelligible, but turns and wraps his body around hers, protecting her, protecting himself as they fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

><p>The Games are playing in the room where Johanna and Finnick are eating breakfast late in the afternoon. There are only three tributes left, the Games are going to be over soon, and it looks like Haymitch has pretty good odds of bringing home at least one Victor.<p>

"What do you think of the rule change," Finnick asks her, nodding at the TV over his toast.

"Delightful," Johanna says, working her way methodically through the food in front of her. She was never much for food, which was good because there never was very much of it when she was growing up. Even now that she has more than enough money to buy whatever delicacies she could want, she still sees food as a means to an end. Eat enough for the energy necessary until the next time you can eat, it doesn't matter what it is. Finnick watches her with amusement mixed with disgust.

"Did you just combine eggs and- never mind," he says, shaking his head at her. "I, for one, am really rooting for those two lovebirds."

"Oh yeah," Johanna says sarcastically, "maybe next year they can make a rule change to bring all of the tributes home."

"I think it is powerful how attached the Capitol audience gets to its Tributes," he says. "It would be wonderful for Haymitch to be able to bring them both back to District 12."

She looks at him for a minute, a loaded fork paused halfway between the plate and her lips. She blinks slowly as she shakes her head the tiniest bit.

He looks thoughtfully at the strawberry he has speared on the end of his fork.

"Yeah," he says slowly. He agrees with her. There is no way that rule change is going to stand. Not if President Snow has anything to say about it.

They go back to eating.

* * *

><p>Haymitch finally has some time after the Games are over and his two (two!) Victors are being made as whole as possible again. They leave the training center, walking as far from the center of the Capitol as they can, finding quiet streets with few people on them. Haymitch looks exhausted but exhilarated in a way that Johanna has never seen before.<p>

"Congratulations Abernathy," she says as they began walking. "Two victors... Who would have thought you would turn out to be the best mentor of us all."

"Who would have thought even your compliments would come spiked with insult?" Haymitch responds. "Scratch that, it isn't surprising at all."

Johanna makes a face but keeps silent. She is itching to know what he needs to tell her.

As they keep walking, Haymitch draws them closer together, looking around carefully for anyone who might be listening, checking the edges of the buildings for any cameras.

"Whatever happens, keep your voice down," he says gruffly before taking a deep breath. "District 13 exists. We have been in nominal contact with them."

Johanna had stopped to look at him in shock after the first bombshell but has to keep moving as Haymitch roughly pulls her along by the arm.

"I knew it," she hisses, anger lacing her voice, "I knew there was an inner circle to the inner circle!"

She makes a noise of frustration and anger. "Why didn't you tell me before? Who else knows? No wait, don't answer that. Why are you telling me now?"

"There you go," Haymitch says approvingly, opening his mouth to answer her.

"That's what Wiress and Fil were working on!" She interrupts him. "Communication to 13."

"Thirteen..." she is shaking her head and there is wonder in her voice. "And freaking Nuts is in on it and I'm not. Although I guess you can't get her to string more than two words together, so you-"

"Johanna. Focus." Haymitch interrupts her train of thought. "I don't know what is going to happen, but something is. There is an energy right now... I have never felt anything like it. And I think we are going to need you."

"Oh well sure," she says sarcastically, "anything to be of service."

"What is 13?" She continues, trying to wrap her mind around this piece of information. "Is it a full district? How does the Capitol not know about this? Wait, does the Capitol know about it? If so, why haven't they tried to destroy them? What are they doing? Why are we working with them? What is their angle?"

Haymitch had tried to interrupt during this barrage of questions, but finally just quieted to let her get them all out.

"Look," he says when she pauses for breath, "it doesn't matter, the key point is that they exist. If something happens, we feel that it is likely going to be necessary to have a place to go to, a base, if you will, of rebel operations. Everything probably isn't going to fall at once, and it certainly isn't going to be easy. We are going to have to be able to get people out. And Thirteen is the place we are going to go."

Johanna realizes that she has never heard Haymitch talk so pointedly. Something has changed, there actually seems to be a center this rebel movement is coalescing around. The talk doesn't seem as directionless and theoretical any more.

"What's changed?" she asks him.

"There is something about the girl-"

"Katniss?" Johanna interrupts.

Haymitch rolls his eyes a little. "There is something about Katniss. She might be what we were waiting for."

"Her?" Johanna's voice rises at this last word, and Haymitch quickly shushes her before looking around.

"Her?" Johanna begins again more quietly but just as intensely. "We were waiting for a 16 year old girl from District 12 with a stupid sappy love story? You have got to be kidding me. If you had told me that in the beginning, I never would have become a part of this suicide mission. What the hell is so special about _her_?"

"Johanna, this isn't about you. This isn't about me. You know what we want to do as well as anyone. I see you in her. I see me in her. But there is something else. She draws people to her without realizing it, makes them want to help her or love her or fight for her. Part of that is coming from the boy certainly... Between the two of them... We have something."

"You know as well as I do that nothing about you invites people in. Everything about you says you can do it yourself, no matter what. Stay away. Even when all anyone saw of you was a crying, sniveling mess, there was nothing about you that encouraged someone else's comfort, that said that anyone could help. That girl, she is strong, but that vulnerability, it's right there too."

"I have to get back soon, and I am not here to talk to you about feelings. There is something happening. Snow is angry, yes, about the two of them and the berries, angrier than when you won, angrier than when I won, but there is something else too, underneath the anger. It's almost as if he is... scared. And if something happens, we need you on our team. I need you on our team. Okay?"

She looks at him, quiet. They have turned around and are walking back towards the training center, back towards his victors.

"Okay." She says finally, sullenly. "But I am not going to pretend to like her."

"I wouldn't expect anything else," he says.

They walk quietly for a couple more minutes as Johanna thinks things over a little longer.

"Does Finn know?" she asks finally.

Haymitch just looks at her out of the side of his eye as if for the first time that day she asked a stupid question.

"Good." She nods.

Right before they get to the Training Center she stops.

"You better be right about this old man," she says, as he turns halfway towards her. "I didn't get this far to die for nothing."

He just gives her a curt nod as he heads away from her towards the building. She turns the other direction and continues walking the candy colored streets of the Capitol alone.


	8. 74 II

74 II.

Johanna walks into the Capitol train station with Holt, the other Mentor from District 7. The normally quiet station is busier than she has ever seen it, with attendants and Peacekeepers bustling through, loading goods and supplies onto the trains that are waiting at every platform.

She sees Wiress and Beetee each holding a square, hard sided case in one corner of the waiting area, then catches sight of the talon of Diana's gold hand guard through the passing lines of people. Diana looks angry, but then again, Diana always looks like she is one step away from killing somebody.

She and Holt exchange a confused glance.

They start to head over to where their train is waiting, Johanna slinging her small bag across her other shoulder, when they run into Finnick and Marina coming from the other direction.

"So you guys were kicked out too, huh?" Johanna says as they stop in the middle of the station. "What the hell is going on?"

"I have never seen the station this crowded," Marina says as she looks around at all the people walking purposefully past them. "And we passed Sterling, Sateen, Ash, _and_ Cerese on our way in."

"Yeah, Nuts and Volts are over there, and Diana is back there somewhere. I am pretty sure Corus left the second that girl shot his tribute in the face, so he is already gone."

Cecelia and Fuller come up to their little knot as they are talking, looking just as confused as the rest of them.

"Do any of you know why we were all told to go back to our districts today?" Fuller asks as he comes up to them. He looks warily at Johanna, but relaxes when she doesn't immediately attack him.

"No," Finnick answers him. "We were just taking inventory, it looks like everyone who hasn't already left is here."

"Well," Cecilia says evenly, "I won't say I am too heartbroken about missing another night of Capitol small talk and too much food."

"But it's weird, right?" Johanna lowers her voice a little even though there is no way anyone could overhear them in the din of the station. "It's like no one is allowed to meet the lovebirds."

"Were you going to do anything but insult them to their faces and then ignore them if you did go to their banquet?" Finnick asks with a smile.

"Well no, but I wanted to be given the opportunity to insult and ignore them." Johanna looks indignant.

When they realize that no one has any more information than anyone else, Cecilia and Fuller go off then to put their things on the train, and Marina walks off with them to get a magazine. Holt goes to check when the train to District 7 was supposed to depart, leaving Finnick and Johanna still standing together.

"I am going to go get a juice," Finnick says as he nods in the direction of a stand.

"Sheesh, you can't wait the 15 minutes until your train leaves?" Johanna grouses, but she picks up her bag to walk with him.

"So what do you think this is about?" Finnick asks as they start to walk.

"I have no idea. Maybe he thinks we're a bad influence or something," Johanna answers.

"Can't imagine why. Maybe he thinks they will be easier to control if they don't know anything..." Finnick muses while looking at the juice stand offerings.

Johanna waits for the man behind the counter to hand Finnick his pineapple mango orange juice.

"In which case he is going to have to get them away from their mentor."

"I think he isn't telling them anything. Protecting them?"

"Huh," Johanna shakes her head. No one ever protected her. "It really is like He is scared of them. Those two stupid kids. What the fuck."

Just then the 15 minute announcement for the District 4 train blares over the loudspeakers.

"Maybe I'll go with you," Johanna says.

Finnick turns quickly to look at her. "To Four?"

"Sure," she says, shrugging.

"Do you have a transport pass?"

"No." She shrugs again.

"Don't get me wrong, I would love it if you came to Four with us. You could come out on the boat with me and Annie..." He smiles as he seems to get into the idea. "But you need a pass. You could get into serious trouble."

"What's the worst that could happen?" Johanna asks.

"Oh I don't know," he says looking down at her, "Beatings? Torture? Death of your family?"

"No big deal," she says breezily. "Nothing I haven't seen before."

He turns to look at her seriously.

"Hey, I know that you don't want to go back to an empty house in District 7 alone, but it'll be okay. I'll call. Annie'll call. I'll even get Mags to call. But I know you have been hearing the same rumors I have. You can't be going and getting into trouble over something stupid. We need to be ready to get into all the real trouble we can."

Johanna is quiet.

"Yeah, I know. You're right," she says finally. "I hate it when you're right."

He laughs quietly as he grabs her in a hug and kisses the top of her head.

"I know," he says before he turns around and jogs off lightly toward the District 4 train, his bag bouncing against his back.

"And don't have that marble-mouthed crone attempt to call me!" She yells at his back.

She doesn't want to stay in the Capitol, but she also doesn't want to go back to District 7. It is getting harder and harder to feel at home when there is nothing tying her to the place, but it isn't like she feels at home any place else. She doesn't belong anywhere anymore.

But she knows that Finnick is right, that there is important work to be done, and that she needs to be back in 7 to do it.

She sighs heavily as she picks up her bag again and heads toward her own train.

There are rumors that the people in the districts are angry and that the whispers of dissent are getting louder. Johanna looks around the train station at all the Peacekeepers that are piling into their own cars on the trains that the Victors, who were all kicked out of the Capitol, are taking home, and thinks that the president has heard the same rumors.

Everyone knows that one of the most important things to get a real rebellion going among the general populace is going to be money, and that is one thing that the Victors have that no one else does. For that alone they are going to be instrumental in getting things to happen, and in making sure people stay alive during whatever crackdown the Capitol is very clearly already starting to send their way.

She weaves through the people who are heading in the direction of the District 7 train and rejoins Holt, who is standing on the platform, looking with increasing concern at the number of Peacekeepers who are joining them on their ride back to their district.

Things are going to get much worse before they get any better if they ever do, and she is under no illusions that she is going to be around to see it if it ever does.

She shrugs at Holt as they turn and board the train.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Thank you to everyone who has reviewed! I guess we are going beyond the 74th Games now..._


	9. 75 Prologue

75 I.

* * *

><p><em>Without hesitation, he reads, "On the seventy-fifth anniversary, as a reminder to the rebels that even the strongest among them cannot overcome the power of the Capitol, the male and female tributes will be reaped from their existing pool of victors.<em>

* * *

><p>Haymitch stares at the television flickering in his otherwise unlit house. There must still be sound coming from it, but he can't hear anything other than the rushing of blood in his ears.<p>

"He knows…" he whispers quietly under his breath.

* * *

><p>Johanna stares at her television silently, fiercely gripping one arm of her couch, her mind whirling with a thousand unfinished thoughts.<p>

"He knows," she grits out between clenched teeth.

Dazed, she walks over to the dark wood bar and pulls out a slender necked bottle of brown liquor. She twists the cap off, continuing to walk through her living room, and throws it carelessly on to her otherwise clean floor. She continues to walk slowly through her house, occasionally taking sips from the bottle that is dangling from her fingers.

She has to give President Snow credit for finding such an elegant way to get rid of all of them, and with all of Panem watching and cheering along. And without even needing to rig the reaping for either her or Katniss. She shakes her head in grudging admiration.

She walks up to the second bedroom, a room that she almost never enters, and looks thoughtfully at the beautiful hardwood chairs that are in there, sitting on either side of a small table against the wall. She sits carefully down in one of them, placing the bottle on the table next to her. She runs her hands down the smooth curve of the armrests and back up, the wood warm and liquid under her hands. She takes another long drink from the bottle. The chair conforms perfectly to her body. She drinks again, her mind going just a little fuzzy at the edges.

She never sits in these chairs. She can't even stand looking at them really, filled as they are with memories of her brother. She drinks again, eyes closed, the wood warm and comforting against her back. She sits there in the dark, her mind blank, and drinks again.

Her eyes snap open, and she looks at the moonlight reflecting off the now half empty bottle sitting on the table next to her. She gets up out of the chair and turns around to look at it, taking in the graceful lines of the thing in the soft light from the window. She picks it up carefully, hefts it, feels the balance in the construction. It is a beautiful piece of work. They did a good job.

She lifts it higher, the light catching it and reflecting dully off of the polished wood, and slams it down into the floor. She hears the sickening crunch of cracking wood and feels the chair warp in her hands. She lifts it up again, slamming it methodically down over and over into the floor, turning it to break the arms, the legs, the curved back.

She picks up the one next to it and slams it into the pile of broken pieces of the first. She works in silence, the only noise the thump and crack of wood against wood and her own breathing getting heavier as she works.

She stops only when they are both reduced to a pile of splintered wood and a couple of screws and walks back out of the room, bottle in hand, closing the door carefully behind her.

* * *

><p>Finnick is sitting on the couch in Annie's living room, his arm wrapped protectively around Annie. Her sister is sitting next to her.<p>

All eyes in the room darted to her as soon as President Snow's words sunk in, but she is only looking at Finnick.

"You're going back in," they breathe simultaneously to each other.

Her father has walked across the room to clasp her mother, whose eyes are filled with tears she won't let fall, by the hand.

"Well, you don't know that," he says slowly, clearing his throat to try to clear out the emotion in his voice. "There are how many-"

"Doesn't matter," Finnick says, cutting him off, but he doesn't say more. He presses his fingers into the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes. _He knows_, he thinks silently to himself.

Her parents don't question him.

Finnick doesn't tell them anything, but they are intelligent, and they have lived in this world for their entire lives. They don't quite understand what pulls Finnick back to the Capitol year after year, but they understand that there must be something else pulling the strings that make him move. As much as they wish that Annie could live a normal life, they know that she is tied inextricably to the man sitting next to her.

Annie's face goes dark.

"I fought you once before," she says questioningly to Finnick.

He turns to face her, taking her two hands in his and looking into her eyes.

"No," he says gently but firmly. "Never. And we never will. Mags will never let you go back into the-"

"Mags!" Annie starts, sitting up straight on the couch, her eyes clear again. "She must be alone. We have to go over there."

She stands up, still connected by one hand to Finnick, and makes to move towards the door.

He looks apologetically at her family as they head out into the cold night. They all know how Annie is. Always concerned about someone else.

It is only after that he lets himself think about it.

After they had talked to Mags, alone in her big house. After they had each passed her another small pouch of coins to distribute through their channels to the striking fishermen and dockworkers. After they had found his sister sitting on his porch and brought her in for a cup of tea. After he and Annie had gone to bed, and he had tasted her, salty and familiar, and felt her twitch and arch under his touch. After he had melted into her, lifting her up, cradling her, and letting himself go like he never did with anyone else. After he held her, the soft press of her breast against his chest and his hand tangled in her hair. After her breathing evened out and slowed and the concerned wrinkle between her eyes smoothed out.

Only then did he let himself think about going back to the Arena. Only then did he think about fighting against people he knew and people he loved. Only then, his face buried in the sweet smell of the crook of her neck, did he cry.

* * *

><p>Beetee looks up from the circuit board he was carefully wiring together under the bottom of his glasses.<p>

"Interesting," he says quietly to the television.

He exchanges glances with Wiress and Fil, who are both sitting on either side of his coffee table, fitting machined rings carefully into the contraption sitting between them.

They are all quiet, frozen in whatever position they were in when they heard the announcement.

"So I am going," Wiress finally says quietly, nodding her head at the machine in front of her like she has just discovered an especially complex obstacle that needs to be worked out.

The ticking of the many clocks that fill Beetee's house crowds the silence.

Wiress, still staring at her machine, gasps out a little "oh!", then reaches in to snap out one piece and exchange it with another. She picks up the soldering iron that had been quietly releasing a thin ribbon of smoke into the air and solders wires to the two pieces.

Fil turns the thing between them after she is done, following the path that electricity would take with his finger.

"Oh, that _is_ better," he says, turning it back. "And then if I…"

His voice trails off as he readjusts the rings.

"There."

This machine, meant to measure the density of different fabrics and different threads in order to pair them optimally together, can easily be modified for much more nefarious purposes. Like almost all of their inventions, all of which are commissioned by the President.

The three of them know that while they invent their supposedly innocuous machines, their brains are being used to further the stranglehold that he has on the districts and on his people, but there is nothing they can do about it. He controls them all the same way, even if the things he wants from them are different.

She nods at the machine, satisfied.

"Are you upset?" Beetee asks after their changes are done.

"Upset..." Wiress pauses, mulling over the word.

"No use," she says quietly. "Not happy... But there is no use in being upset. Must play by the rules. We all have to die someday and nothing changes that by being upset about it."

He nods. There is no need for them to say anything else.

They all continue to work, regardless of the announcement that was just made.

* * *

><p>Haymitch stumbles into his kitchen, leaving the television to spit its images into empty space.<p>

He flicks on the overhead light and bangs around the place until he finds an unopened bottle of white liquor in one of the cabinets. He sits down at the dirty table in the middle of the space and gives the cap on the bottle a violent twist, comforted by the familiar cracking noise of the seal breaking. He takes his first swig straight from the bottle then puts his head down on the table, still holding the bottle with one hand. He looks thoughtfully at the knife in his other hand, twirling it around the point that he has stuck directly into the scarred wood of his kitchen table.

So they are all going to die in yet another spectacle for yet another overfed Capitol audience, and everything is going to stay the same in Panem.

He watches the kitchen light glint off the blade of his dull knife.

The door opens and his head shoots up as his hand clenches the knife a little tighter, but he relaxes when he sees the now familiar blond head of Peeta walk purposefully through the door. His face is pale and his eyes are rimmed red, but the look he gives Haymitch is determined.

Haymitch slumps down a little in his seat, his weight pressing into the bottle. It is the only thing keeping him semi-upright.

"Don't tell me," Haymitch mutters as he takes another long swig from his bottle, "You're here to save the girl."


	10. 75  Before

75 - Before.

Johanna walks into the basement of the Palace, which is still as half constructed as ever.

The developers of the project had lost their funding and the fate of the building had been in litigation for years, which was perfect for their uses. It was also a reminder to the victors that not everyone in the Capitol is as well off as the people they interact with. Some people clearly deal with the real impact of not having enough, even if it is at a different level than what anyone in the districts experience.

Finnick is already there, sitting on the couch. He keeps flicking the hood of his grey cashmere sweatshirt on and off, sometimes obscuring his face, sometimes not. His right leg vibrates with nervous energy, tapping out an erratic rhythm on the unfinished floors.

"Where's the old man?" Johanna asks him. Her fitted leather jacket is unzipped, revealing that her shirt, made of strips of fabric that crisscross across her chest, still leaves much of her skin exposed.

"Late," Finnick replies, barely looking up at her.

It is three in the morning, but none of them were expecting to get much sleep anyway, no matter how much they need it.

"I saw you have a little fun with her yesterday." Johanna says as she sits down next to him. "What was that bit with the sugar cubes?"

Finnick stops tapping his foot and looks at her. He is pulling on the strings of his hood, cinching it around his face. It is not his best look. He lets them go to reach his hand out to Johanna, and they spring back, loosening the hood so that is barely on his head.

"Sugar cube?" he says in a voice that she rarely hears any more, reaching out his empty hand and dropping his eyes. "You want something sweet, you better grab it quick."

He grins, and she laughs.

"I heard you stuck your boobs in his face," he says to her.

"That doesn't sound like me," she says too innocently.

"You should have seen her face," she laughs. "She was _not_ happy about it. At least we can have a little fun before we go to our noble deaths."

Finnick smiles with her, but his foot starts tapping again. She sighs, exasperated, knowing she shouldn't have said anything and trying to come up with something else to say when Haymitch finally bursts through the door.

He looks tired and as rumpled as usual, but the white shirt that he is wearing is made out of fine cotton, and it is clean. Someone else must be dressing him for a change.

"Okay," he says, not stopping to sit down, "she hates all of you. Of course, you guys couldn't help yourselves and clearly went out of your way to make her as uncomfortable as possible, which was great."

He glares pointedly at Johanna.

"You could at least try keeping your clothes on some of the time."

"Hello to you too. And hey, you want me to die for the girl, you might as well let me have a little fun first." She shrugs at him. "Besides, she'll get her revenge when she shoots me through the eye at 100 paces."

"That is actually exactly what I am trying to prevent from happening, no thanks to you two."

Haymitch turns to Finnick.

"And you. I thought you were supposed to be _good_ with women," he says in his direction. "Your job over the next couple of days is to get her to like you. She already likes Mags, so that should be an in for you. If not, we will have to figure something else out."

Finnick nods.

"You would think with that face it would be easy, but of course, she has to make everything more difficult," Haymitch continues under his breath.

"You," Haymitch pivots back to Johanna, "there is no hope for. So you are going to have to earn your in with Chaff and Seeder or Beetee and Wiress."

"Nuts and Volts?" Johanna asks, incredulous. "You have got to be kidding me."

"We need them to get you out of there. As delightful and deadly as you are, we need someone with real brains to do the heavy lifting on that front. And lucky for us, _they_ actually managed to make a good impression on the girl."

Of course, Johanna thinks to herself, Mags, Nuts, Volts. Katniss has to do everything her way.

"I would feel a lot better about this whole thing if I had any idea how you were planning on actually getting us out of the arena while all of Panem is watching," Johanna mutters to herself.

"No go sweetheart," Haymitch says with a deadly smile. "But we will get you out. When we get a better idea of what we are working with, we'll let you know when."

"And how are you going to communicate with us while we are in the Arena?" Finnick asks before Johanna can get out another snide remark.

"The only way we can communicate," Haymitch says. "Through the gifts we send. It'll be bread. District equals day, number equals hour. Got it?"

Finnick nods again.

"So Johanna, either you and Blight meet up with Finnick, who will have managed to make Katniss like him, Chaff and Seeder, or Wiress and Beetee before trying to team up with Katniss and Peeta. Whatever you do, do not let her kill you."

"Oh really? I am not supposed to let that little bitch kill me?" Johanna mutters some more. "You should really be worried about her."

Haymitch ignores her.

"Obviously get Cecelia if you can, Woof is hopeless, Evangeline and Iskander would help you if they can, but they are probably going to be dealing with too many withdrawal symptoms, Sta-"

"We get it," Johanna interrupts him, "1 and 2 are bad, everyone else is good, don't get caught up with drunks and addicts, save the Mockingjay, no Mockingjay without the boy. We don't need to be treated like idiots. Although I do see how someone could be confused, given that we are trusting you with our lives."

Finnick's foot gets going again.

Haymitch checks the watch in his pocket and is about to go right back out the door he came in when Johanna throws one more thought his way.

"Hey, so you know there is no love lost between Silas and me but doesn't this plan screw over our mentors? It doesn't seem like you are going to be able to get everybody out of the mentor room in the training center in the middle of the Capitol after whatever you are planning to have happen in the arena happens."

Haymitch looks levelly at Johanna.

In that quiet moment, she sees how much older he looks, and she realizes how much each of the lives that he is asking be sacrificed in the name of some greater good weighs on him. Especially when there are no guarantees that those sacrifices won't be made in vain. She wonders how exactly he found himself in this role, ultimate mastermind of a revolution, but knows that if she asks him she will only get a glib remark about how much smarter he is than everyone else in response.

"Every person understands the risks of what is being asked of them," he says evenly, but there is a quick flash of guilt in his eyes before he looks away from her.

Everyone except, of course, his own mentees.

"Any last advice?" Finnick asks as he stands up, pushes his hood completely off his head, takes a deep breath, and squares his shoulders.

Haymitch has already started back toward the door he came in through, but he pauses now and turns back toward them.

"Yeah," he says with a growl, "stay alive."

And with that, he is gone.

Johanna exhales sharply as she stands up next to Finnick, running both hands tiredly through her short hair.

"Oof, I need a drink. And a fuck."

Finnick looks down at her with a flirtatious half smile.

"I thought we didn't do that Miss Mason."

"Not everything is about you, Pretty Boy," she says as she elbows him lightly in the side. "You can at least buy me a drink."

"Besides," she continues as she leads them toward the door, "it's the end of the world. All bets are off."

"Oh really?" he laughs, grabbing her hand as they step into the dark hallway. He turns on the flashlight he had in his pocket even though they both could most likely do the walk by feel.

"You know we aren't supposed to be out of the training center." His voice drops in the hall even though no one can hear them. "We are Tributes after all."

"Like anyone in Colosseum would say anything," she says scornfully. "But fine. Rooftop? Swipe a bottle from your floor."

"It's a date," he says as they reach the door that leads outside. "Maybe if you're lucky you'll get a little action. A little making out?" He licks his lip. "A little tongue?"

"Ha! You mean if _you_ are lucky," she says peering carefully out the door.

And with that, they slip silently out into the night, one after the other, taking different paths back to the Training Center that looms, a glittering fortress, in the middle of the quiet city.


	11. 75 After

75 – After.

Annie isn't sure where she is, except that it is somewhere in the Capitol. She is being walked down a hallway with a Peacekeeper on either side of her and another behind her. Her feet are shackled together. She would laugh at the ridiculous precautions they seem to be taking with her, but she knows it would hurt the still throbbing side of her face. She probes the inside of her cheek with her tongue, tasting her own coppery blood.

They walk down the middle of another hallway, also dimly lit and clinically white, but wide. She sees beds bolted into the walls on either side at even intervals, with a spigot mounted next to each and what looks like a drainage grate underneath it. Every once in a while there are brighter white lines that paint out a square area around the beds, and a person, in the same white cotton shirt and drawstring pants that she is wearing, usually huddled against the wall. They all look as crazy as she feels.

They are walking her almost to the end of the hallway, but out of the corner of her eye, she recognizes the wide set brown eyes in the figure pacing in the middle of one of the squares.

She almost calls out to Johanna, but bites down on the injured side of her mouth to stop herself. She stumbles over her chained feet as the Peacekeepers momentum keeps moving her forward. She sees Johanna stop her pacing as they pass her and open her mouth, but she too stays silent, even as her tense body seems ready to explode. Annie wonders why she doesn't move, why she doesn't follow them down the hall.

The Peacekeepers shove her toward one of the beds a couple down from where she saw Johanna. One of them takes something out of her pocket, some sort of control panel, and types into it. Bright lines show up in a square on the floor around her and the shackle around her feet drops off with a clatter onto the floor. Annie just sits down on the edge of the bed as the Peacekeepers turn around and head back in the direction that they came from, taking the shackle that had been on her feet with them.

She wonders what is going to happen next.

She wants to ask Johanna where they are and what is going to happen to them, but she doesn't want to shout down the hall, even after the echoing tread of the Peacekeepers boots has faded away. She goes to move toward where Johanna is still standing, tense and coiled and furious. She tentatively puts her hand out over where the line on the floor only to find herself shocked and flung back toward the middle of the space.

"Force field..." she whispers to herself, shaking her hand as she picks herself up off the floor. No wonder everyone stays near their beds. It seems too perfect, trapping them in cages that they can't see.

"Invisible cages," she says out loud, facing Johanna.

"I know, right? It is almost too good," Johanna answers, her voice raspy and hard. "They picked you up from Four, huh?"

Annie takes a closer look at Johanna over the distance. The girl is even skinnier than she usually is. There are scabby looking marks on what skin is exposed, and her hair looks like it is falling out. There isn't any evidence of the gash Annie had seen Enobaria give her before the Games blacked out though. They must have gone to the trouble of putting her back together, fixing the holes, just so they could tear her back apart, this time as slowly as possible.

Tears spring to Annie's eyes.

"Finn?" she asks quietly.

"Don't know." Johanna's voice is icy and diamond hard, but Annie knows the pain that is behind it. "Don't know about anyone."

Annie goes to sit on her bed and Johanna does the same. There is nothing for them to talk about, not here.

Annie thinks.

They questioned her before they brought her down here, asking her what she knew about what the other Victors, especially Finnick, were doing in the Arena and what else they had planned, but even her questioners didn't seem to think she had any answers for them.

In the hours after the Games went dark, chaos reigned throughout District 4. The people were ready to fight back against the Peacekeepers in the district, against the injustices they were seeing now that they had a rallying point. And in a Career district, it looked like the rebels were actually making progress. Annie was scared, especially for Finnick, especially for her siblings, but she never fell apart. Even her broken mind seemed to know that this was the fight, and there wasn't time to do anything but help as much as possible. She passed out as much food and as many coins as she could under the cover of darkness, but it didn't seem to be enough. She even had a small stash of deadly sharp knives that she had managed to slip to her family along with what was left of her money.

The empty sheath that the Peacekeepers had found still strapped to her leg had been enough to earn her a belt across the cheek after they picked her up.

She isn't sure how long ago that was now, but that night she could see the sea from her window, lit by the light of burning boats, burning livelihoods, and they still sent ten Peacekeepers to her door to get her. She knows that they couldn't spare the soldiers, not with everything that was happening. She was only one crazy girl living in a house with her parents.

She can't think about the sound of the sound of her mother's scream as the Peacekeepers dragged her from their house, but she remembers the flash of determination in the eyes of her sister when their eyes met, before whatever drugs they shot into her knocked her out, and is comforted by her strength.

Someone must have really wanted her here in the Capitol to bring that kind of man power to her house in the middle of the night, and she can only think that it means that it is for Finnick's benefit. That means wherever he is, he is alive.

She buries her face in her hands, wanting to feel relief at knowing that Finnick must be alive, but all she can think about is what she is almost certain is going to be the last time she saw her family.

She comes to on the floor in the middle of her square, gasping for breath, and feeling a sharp, electric current running all the way from one side of her face to her foot. She sits up and hangs her head between her knees, trying to force air back into her lungs.

"You are going to have to stop running from whatever it is you see."

Annie turns her head to see Johanna's body framed by one of her legs.

"Although it did get you to stop screaming, which was nice." Johanna sits down so that Annie can see her face. "So never mind, keep running."

"I'm never going to see my family again," Annie just says sadly to her. Johanna's shoulders slump, but she doesn't say anything in response. Down the hallway, they hear the gurgling scream of someone who has been turned into an Avox.

They both turn to face the wall in front of them, trying to will away the horrors they both know are real and not saying anything else.

* * *

><p>The hallway is always kept lit at the same dim level and Annie is starting to have trouble differentiating which nightmare is real and which is in her head. She can't tell how much time has passed before she hears the clip of people walking briskly down the hall wheeling something between them.<p>

They had brought Peeta down to the same prison that she and Johanna are in at some point, and Annie sees him now, standing up to brace himself for whatever is coming down the hallway. She doesn't know much about the boy she sees in his own invisible cage across the hall, only what little she saw of him on television, and even that she paid as little attention to as possible. He looks so young, but there is something in the way that he has planted his feet as he looks down the hallway that makes her like him.

She sees them once they stop at Johanna's square, and she finally starts to understand the brilliance of the force fields. They expand hers to fit the additional people and equipment, and she can still see and hear everything. They strap her into what looks like a clear, shallow box, which they fill with water. For someone who looks more like a half starved animal than anything else, Johanna puts up a solid fight being put into the contraption. They all seem ready for her, but she still manages to solidly kick one of the orderlies right between the legs.

Annie can almost see Johanna's familiar mocking grin in her mind.

The man holding a screen in his hand starts to ask Johanna questions, the rote way he is asking them indicating that they have all been through this before. When Johanna stays silent, Annie sees that the contraption is actually connected to the force field around them, magnifying it, and with a press of a button, electricity is sent coursing through Johanna's soaked body. Johanna arches up, a horrible scream tearing out of her. The acrid smell of singed hair reaches Annie.

She can't stop herself in that instant, her hands reach up and she moves towards Johanna to help her. She immediately feels the now familiar course of electricity pulse through her and push her back toward the middle of her square and hears the familiar zapping noise of something hitting a force field. The sound is almost instantly echoed slightly farther down the hall, and she sees Peeta, stumbling back, hands in front of him, still reaching toward Johanna as the electric force pushes him backward.

"The rats learned faster," the woman also holding a screen comments, glancing up from what looks like Johanna's vital signs in front of her toward Peeta. Annie can't tell if it is surprise or scorn in her voice.

Annie turns to throw herself against her bed, stuffing everything she can over her ears to drown out the screams that they continue to pull out of Johanna.

The force fields are brilliant. Torture one, torture them all.

Annie listens to Johanna's screams, tears streaming out of her eyes, until they mix with the familiar screams of 23 children, and she is once again back in her forested arena. She knows she has to fight, but she is so tired and scared and so tired of being scared that she just lays down to go to sleep on the cold forest floor.

When she wakes up, she is still there, and the screams start again, even though they shouldn't have been able to last the night. She wonders why, why they always come back when all she is going to do is kill them again and again, the life ebbing out of their faces right in front of her.

She is in a familiar fight, and she sees Dover's head by her feet and blood covering her hands and her knife. She runs through the forest, finally getting clear of the decapitated body that had been following her, but she keeps running until she is in a white hallway.

She sees a boy across the way from her, surround by people in long white coats, and he is screaming too, but she can't understand his words. She isn't sure if she knows who he is, his face is covered, the area where his eyes should be a dark, blank space.

She realizes then that he is wearing a helmet, and that she recognizes the helmet from when she was in the Capitol. They used it on her when they were trying to alter her memories, the space in front of her eyes filled with scenes from her Games. She wonders how the arena was connected to the same hospital and she never knew it.

She wants to keep running, but no matter which direction she goes, she ends up back in the same place, across from the boy.

The other figures finally leave, taking the helmet and other equipment with them, and she sees that she does know the boy that was under there, that it is Peeta. She finally understands what he is saying as he paces around in a tight circle.

"She killed them. She killed them all. She killed them. She killed them all." He says it in time with his pacing. She has to get out of here.

"If you believe that, you really are as stupid as you look."

Annie turns and sees Johanna staring at Peeta scornfully, arms crossed over her chest. This nightmare must be reality, and it is happening right in front of her.

He stops pacing to look at Johanna.

"But... But..." He crumples to the ground, holding his arms tightly around himself, and rocks back and forth on the ground.

"What are you, an idiot? You think anything that they are showing you is real? I didn't realize baking was the profession of the epically brainless."

He doesn't get up, but he stops rocking and looks pleadingly at her. He wants to believe her.

Johanna picks up the bowl that is on the ground and takes it over to the bed, where she quickly gulps it down.

"And eat," she shoots at him before she lies down, turning away from him. "You have to be stronger than that."

He doesn't move for awhile, but eventually Annie sees him slowly pull himself up and go over to his own bed, bowl in hand.

* * *

><p>Time is telescoping in on itself and stretching out to interminable lengths, and the only thing worse than the anxiety stricken boredom of sitting in her small square waiting is when the horrible tortures start up again.<p>

One day? One night? They are all quiet, even the other prisoners stuck in this hallway with them, until Peeta starts to talk.

Annie can see him lying on his bed, his arm dangling down, his fingers tracing patterns on the cold cement floor.

"I am the youngest," he starts, slowly, in a voice hoarse from being used only for screaming, "so I always got stuck doing the bad jobs, the ones that my brothers didn't want to do."

She sees Johanna, lying flat on the ground to try to ease the pain in her back, turn her head towards him. Annie thinks for a second that Johanna is going to say something, but she stays silent. Johanna has been quieter, has been moving around less and getting skinnier, and Annie is worried that when all the fight and fire drains out of her, there is going to be nothing left.

"So I always had to wake up first, hours before sunrise, to help my father proof the dough for the day's bread before school," Peeta continues, his voice getting stronger.

"We all hated getting up a second before we had to, but whatever method we chose to determine who had to do it, I always lost."

"I never told them, but I also kind of loved being in the bakery with my father without anyone else, while the whole town was still asleep. Just the two of us. We didn't usually talk or anything, just worked side by side to get the job done as quickly as possible. But I never felt closer to him than those mornings."

"And I would always go outside to get the wood to start up the ovens right when the first hints of the rising sun started to burn off the mist that collected in the bowl of the town center at night. It would look like the entire town was materializing from nothing to start the day. Like it disappeared every night when everyone went to sleep and reappeared every morning just before they woke up. But I was one of the special people who was allowed to see it happen. The sun would hit the clock face on the Justice Building first, which would glint pink and orange in the soft purple stone of the building, before it would start hitting the windows of all the buildings lining the town square. Each one would glow as the last traces of the mist burnt off in the light, and the town would actually look beautiful for a moment, all the coal dust and peeling paint hidden in the purple shadows."

Annie had closed her eyes when he started speaking and now sees the way the sun would shine off the water in the morning when they spent days out on the family boat. She can almost feel the soft breeze that would come off the water and the rough wood of the deck splintering under her fingers. That girl is who she really is, she has to remind herself. Not this dirty shell of a person. Just like that boy is who Peeta really is.

Johanna makes a noise, and Annie turns to her, thinking that she might say something, but she still stays silent. In the dim light, Annie thinks she can just make out a tear streaking down her temple and onto the cold floor.

There is nothing else in the timeless wasteland of pain and boredom that they are locked in with no hope of getting out. Nothing else to keep them from giving up completely. So they keep talking, the three of them, telling each other the stories that they need to tell themselves to remember who they really are.

That once they loved and were loved.

That once they were sane.


	12. 76

76.

Johanna sits on the edge of her bed and twists to stretch her back. Her muscles are sore and her hands are a mess from working with her gun, but the pain is satisfying. It feels good to work her body like it is supposed to be worked.

She lies down on her bed and closes her eyes, waiting for Katniss to finish getting ready and turn out the light. Her back actually feels okay for a change, and she was even able to wash her hands earlier. Sometimes just the sound of the water hitting the bowl of the sink is enough to get her breathing hard, and she has to rush to turn it off, closing her eyes and working through the coping mechanisms that her stupid head doctor has been trying to get her to use. But tonight she is feeling okay.

She hears the light click off and Katniss get into her own bed.

Johanna is just starting to nod off when Katniss' voice breaks the silence.

"What... What did they do to you?"

She says it quietly and hesitantly. It's clear that she has been thinking about it for a while.

Johanna rolls it around in her mind in silence. What did they do to her? They tried to kill her and break her in every way they could from the second she was reaped until the moment her broken, unconscious body was dragged out of the Capitol by the rebels. They sold her body, they killed her family, they tortured her and almost everyone she knew, they forced her to watch her district starve, they took her sanity... They, they, they. What didn't they do?

"They..." Johanna says slowly, then lapses into silence. She doesn't want to think about this anymore. Isn't that what her head doctor said? Move forward?

"They forced me to spend the rest of my life with some soppy blond who loved me no matter what I did," she says finally, sarcastically.

Katniss makes an exasperated noise on the other side of the room.

"Why do you hate me?" she asks, plaintively.

"What is it with you? Why do you care?" Johanna shoots back. "I'm not your mom. Not everyone has to like you, you know."

"Besides," she says quietly after a pause, "I don't even hate you."

"Well you certainly don't like me," Katniss responds.

"Yeah. I don't." Johanna rolls onto her side, facing away from Katniss and tries to fall back asleep, but she can feel Katniss expectantly waiting in the silence.

"It's not like I owe you anything..." she mutters as turns again to face Katniss' bed.

"Okay, so part of it is your annoying holier-than-thou routine with the wanting to save every broken doll and injured bird, and part of it is that you are so important that I am supposed to get my ass killed to save you. But mostly it's your attitude like you are the only person who got a shitty deal in this world."

"You walked into the ground floor of the Remake Center that first day, never having met another Victor but your own mentor, and acted like we were the assholes."

"Guess what sweetheart," she continues, putting mocking emphasis on Haymitch's word, "the rest of us were reaped too. The rest of saw the ugliness of the Capitol and the President much more starkly, much more viciously than you ever did. You looked at us like we were freaks, but you had no idea. Look at Finnick-"

"I know about Finnick," Katniss says quietly into the dark.

"Not just that," Johanna says, exasperated. "You think that because he is from a career district, because he is one of the youngest winners in history, because he had sponsors, that his Games were different from yours. That they weren't as bad. Well you know what is really means to be the youngest winner of the Games? It means that he stood up on that stage, fourteen, in a career district, and no one volunteered for him. Not the few that actually did train seriously, not any of the people who knew his mother was sick, not anyone."

"His mother was sick?" Katniss asks, not really expecting an answer.

"There are things you still don't know about us, Mockingjay. Have you ever thought about how many parents all of us victors in Thirteen have between us? It's one. Your mother."

"We still don't know about Annie's-"

"Yeah," Johanna interrupts, "I am sure they are just fine, sitting in their old house in East Shore, eating caviar and definitely not getting stormed by a Peacekeeper army."

Katniss stays quiet.

"Look, just..." Johanna's tone has softened. She doesn't know why she is attacking the girl. She is only seventeen, of course everything is about her. And her life has been impossibly hard. And there is an impossibly large amount riding on her slender shoulders.

"We're all dealing with our own shit, okay? As best we can," she pauses. "And you could try cutting Crazymutt Mellark some slack."

She and Annie probably know best what that boy went through, how hard he fought, how long it took for them to break him down. How much he loves her.

"Now I need to get some sleep if I am going kick your ass in the run tomorrow."

"I can't believe Johanna Mason is telling me about who to cut some slack," Katniss says under her breath. "And you are going to need more than a good night's sleep to beat me."

Johanna smiles as she twists back onto her back. The girl might be okay after all.

* * *

><p>She hears the water before she sees it, dripping, swirling, rushing, down the fake streets toward her.<p>

"This isn't going to be good," she thinks to herself just before the dark wall of water reaches her.

It slides over her feet, soaking through her socks and up the hem of her pants, reaching her ankles, all in an instant.

The voice of her fake squadron leader is shouting orders in her ear, but she can't move. It is taking all her strength to keep her eyes locked on the building in front of her and breathe, but the second the water touches her bare skin, and she can feel the ripple of the fabric of her pants flitting against her leg in the swirl of the water, she knows she can't hang on.

They are back, and it is going to be the last time. She can't do it anymore, she can't fight anymore; they have beaten her. She is already in the water, shaking, waiting for the shocks to come, waiting for the fire to tear its way through her body, so she curls up on herself and waits for death to finally, mercifully, take her.

She comes to back in the hospital slowly, through the familiar, heavy haze of morphling. She tries to remember how she got here, back to the beginning, as if the last couple of weeks never happened, when she remembers the water. She is so tired, it seems complete psychotic breaks will do that to a person, but she knows that she can't risk closing her eyes. She doesn't know what awaits her in her dreams.

The door to her hospital room is pushed open slowly, but before she can brace herself for whatever new horror is coming for her, she sees Finnick's familiar face.

He looks worried.

He comes up to her and runs his hand softly over her forehead and through the stubble of her hair. Just the soft touch of someone else, someone who cares about her, is enough to make her eyes fill with tears.

"Hey Jo," he says softly, looking down at her.

She hates herself for tearing, for being so soft, so easy.

"So I guess you are going to get there first after all," she says hoarsely after a moment.

"Guess so," he says quietly. Then he gets in next to her on the bed, which is angled in a half sitting position, and pulls her close to him. "Guess so."

They lay there together in silence for a moment.

"We were always in this together," he says thoughtfully before the silence stretches on too long.

"And now I won't be there," she says in response. She tears again. She isn't sure what is going on. It must be all the drugs they have her on.

"It would have been better if you were coming too," he says. "Better for me, I mean. Better for the rebellion. But you need to fix yourself first. We all asked too much of you. You yourself most of all. Rely too much on the strongest and use them up."

She can't help the tear that escapes her full eyes.

"I lied, you know, in the Arena," she says, her voice quavering a little, "When I said-"

"I know," he says over her, not letting her finish the thought. He drops his cheek onto her head, warm and comforting and solid.

"You just get better so I won't feel bad gloating about how I killed the president while you lay wallowing in a hospital bed, okay?" he says after a minute, pushing himself back up and out of her bed.

"Katniss is supposed to come by any second. She wants to see how you are doing."

"Well, I don't really want to see her," Johanna shoots back, quick, like herself.

"Shut up," Finnick says back with a knowing smile. "Don't try to pretend you don't like her with me. I've seen right through that attitude of yours from day one."

"Don't tell me to shut up," she says, but she closes her eyes with a small smile as she drops her head back against her pillow.

He looks at her lying in her bed, small and wiry, and stripped of all her costumes and attitude. He grasps her hand and kisses her forehead gently.

"Love you, Miss Mason."

Her eyes snap open.

"Don't go doing anything stupid like dying," she says suddenly, fiercely.

"Don't worry," he says, trademark smile on his lips, "I'm a Victor."

He pauses in the doorway for a long second, looking back at her, before he is gone.

* * *

><p>The days go by slowly in the hospital. Johanna goes through therapy everyday with the same doctor that she never trusted from before, but there is nothing motivating her like there was before. There is no chance that she is going to go to the Capitol, there is no chance she is going to kill President Snow, there is no chance that she will do anything for the rebel cause.<p>

She wants to just lay back and let the morphling run through her and dull all her senses. She wants to be like Evangeline and Iskander were, high and uncaring and protected from reality by a warm cocoon of pharmaceuticals, but they won't give her even that in this underground hell hole.

They wean her off the drugs, and she goes thudding down once again to reality, but they can't make her care about anything. They force her to stand in the bathroom as they run water into the sink, slowly trying to accustom her to the noise. They have to sedate her to get her into the bath.

Once in a while she slips out of her hospital room to wander the halls, slipping through doors behind people, turning quickly down abandoned pathways. She usually remembers to pull on some pants. It means she is less likely to be immediately flagged as a crazy-ward escapee.

She has spent days, weeks in this state, weeks that have felt like months, when she sees the breaking news report from the Capitol.

The pictures flash by on the television screen, just like they would in the sky in the arena, the television crew, that one soldier from Thirteen, the cousin, Finnick, Peeta, the Mockingjay. All dead.

Johanna watches President Snow's eulogy for the Mockingjay and the rebellion, and then watches President Coin's same eulogy from the other direction. There is something in the made up, painted face of Katniss that they show in front of a burning background that twists something inside of Johanna, that makes her want for an instant to get up and fight for her cause.

She knows they are manipulating her with their images, but there is something to that girl all the same. Because she doesn't believe it for a second, that all of them are gone at once, and she won't believe it until she sees their bodies laid out in front of her.

She lies down on her bed to try to lose herself in a dreamless sleep and is laying there, eyes closed but mind still awake, when she hears someone come into her room.

She cracks open one eye.

"Annie," she says, with a hint of surprise.

"You weren't sleeping, were you?" Annie asks, concerned as always.

"Nope."

"You saw the report?"

"Yup."

Annie sits down in the chair opposite the door, and the two of them sit there in silence.

"I don't believe it either," she says after a couple of minutes.

Johanna nods but stays silent.

They sit together a while longer, neither of them saying anything but both understanding all the same. When Annie gets up to go, Johanna swings her feet down to the floor and catches her hand as she passes by. They give each other a quick squeeze before letting go.

Annie comes back the next day.

It surprises Johanna that Annie can sit and watch the coverage of the war that is happening in the Capitol, especially with the shifting reports on who is dead and who isn't. Especially with Finnick. But Johanna doesn't question it. Who can say why any of them are as crazy or as sane as they are?

It is the fourth day of the two of them sitting and watching the coverage together when they see it. The television is showing a report about the evacuation of the Capitol citizens to the city center, when it is interrupted by a message saying that they had recovered the body of one of the rebel leaders. And then Finnick's face is on the screen again, larger than life but just as beautiful.

Annie and Johanna's hands find each other instinctively as the report continues, detailing Finnick's rise to fame as a Victor and subsequent fall under the thrall of rebels. They have so many pictures of him, eleven years of pictures of him, but none of them really look like him. Not like he really is.

The slowly mounting pain in Johanna's hand is the only thing that calls her back to the other woman in the room. She turns to her now, looking at her face, which is sickly white with eyes open wide in horror. The grip she has on her hand is a death grip.

"Hey, Annie. Annie. Hey." Johanna says as she turns the girl's head toward her and softly pushes a strand of her dark hair away from her face.

But when Annie looks up at her with panic in her eyes, Johanna realizes that there is nothing she can say. There are no words that will make this any better, and as she realizes this, looking into Annie's eyes, Johanna's face crumples and quick tears make their way down her cheeks.

In a second, Annie's face is blank and her scream is the sound of a heart breaking, a horrible noise that Johanna heard once before, blunted by television speakers.

Nurses and orderlies come running into the room, bringing with them the brisk noises of people doing their jobs, as if this were any other day, as if everything was still the same. They pry Johanna's hand out of Annie's, breaking their connection, to wheel her out of the room, and Johanna is left alone once again, in a starched white bed in an anonymous room with crushing pain threatening to suffocate her.

* * *

><p><em>AN: I have completely bummed myself out so I will have to take this someplace at least a little happier. Thanks again to everyone who has reviewed!_


	13. 1 I

1 I.

Johanna is back on a train. She is comforted now by the steady motion of it over the tracks. She feels most at home these days in the moving cars, traveling between the places other people call home.

She settles down in the small car she has been assigned, stretching her feet across the row of seats and pulling her jacket up over her torso, her small bag on the rack above her.

They had tried to get her to stay in the Capitol that day after the vote. After Katniss killed Coin and Snow killed himself and Katniss was dragged, kicking, screaming, destroyed, to her room in the Training Center.

Johanna stayed one night in her room in the Training Center, the closets filled with clothes that looked like ghosts and the walls ringing with memories, before she left, early the next morning, to catch the first train back to District 7.

They wanted her to stay in the Capitol, to work with their doctors, to go wherever they took Annie and Peeta, but they couldn't stop her when she left. They told her that she was unwell, that they could help her, and the dead eyed stare she gave them, her laughing _nobody can help me_ probably didn't reassure anyone.

But they couldn't stop her when she left.

People can move freely now between the districts, and they are busily making plans for more trains to connect the districts directly to each other, but right now most people are busy trying to rebuild the destroyed remains of their homes and livelihoods, and the trains are mostly empty.

She stayed in District 7 first, in her old house in Victors Village. The place had been ransacked, the front door ripped off its hinges and most of the windows on the first floor broken, but Johanna stayed there anyway, not fixing anything, not caring about what was taken. The only things she had really owned, she had destroyed herself.

She had let the water run in her shower as hot as she could stand, steeling herself as steam filled the room and the minutes ticked by until she forced herself into it. But she did it, all on her own. Each time it got a little bit easier.

She walked through the district, long, ranging walks that took her through all the different villages she could reach on foot until she would have to flag down a passing car or transport truck to drive her back to her house. Sometimes she picked up an axe or a hammer or a shovel and helped with whatever rebuilding task she came across, but mostly she just walked. The people in the district gave her a wide berth; part awe, part fear.

She wasn't sure what was worse when walking around the district; seeing all the faces that she recognized, however vaguely, or noticing all the faces that weren't there, however little she had cared for them, but she kept walking anyway.

She stayed there for weeks, watching Katniss' trial on the television that still hung crookedly on her wall, the wind blowing through the empty window frames, swirling leaves and bits of detritus around her. The television was still there, no one wanted another television. She never bothered to straighten it.

She remembered what Finnick had said, about using her up. About taking the strongest, those who had the most to give, those that were needed most, and bleeding them dry. It was the only thing she could think about, seeing the haunting pictures of the skinny, scarred girl sitting alone in the room she had already imagined twice before to be the last room she ever saw while other people debated her right to live.

And she didn't have the luxury of choice, this Mockingjay. Johanna had known the terrible, irreversible choice she was making, but Katniss didn't ever make a choice, not really. It was made for her.

Johanna hadn't realized that she was waiting for anything, but when Katniss was let out of her room, out of the Capitol, and taken back to District 12, Johanna realized that she had to leave. There was nothing left in the district that made it her home, nothing but the dried husks of old memories.

She left on the first train that she could get on, not caring where it went.

Since then she has been moving from district to district, spending a couple of days or a couple of weeks in one before deciding to move on, usually impulsively, usually on the first train she can find. She stays in the hostels and boarding houses that are springing up, housing the people who are slowly starting to move around the country, or the people who have nowhere else to stay while they attempt to rebuild all the broken infrastructure as fast as they can. The new government is still paying the Victors even as everything else was still being hammered out, so at every stop Johanna took out money and spread out as much as she could. With so few victors left, it must have felt like the least they could do.

Johanna had understood quickly why there were so few people her generation in her district, given the need for anyone with construction ability throughout Panem - Pax Republic - she corrects herself. She wonders how long it is going to take to get this new country on its feet, while being amazed at how quickly some changes have already come into being.

Someone opens the door to her train compartment but quickly closes the door again with a stammering apology she can't fully understand. At least there are some advantages to being a notorious rebel leader out of the Capitol against doctor's orders.

She isn't sure exactly where this train is going. She had jumped on the first train she could find out of District 10 and is intending to ride it all the way to its last stop, wherever that is. It can't be any better or worse than any of her other stops.

She is mildly surprised when she is jolted awake hours later in District 2.

She drops her bag in the first boarding house she can find outside the train station that has a vacancy sign. She pays in advance for two nights with the last of her money, then heads out to find a bank and some food. She quickly sniffs her shirt. And probably a new shirt.

She walks through the roads toward the city center, surprised by the number of people she sees purposefully walking the streets. In every face that she passes she thinks she sees Enobaria, Brutus, Diana, Marc, Dom, the female tribute from her games, the male tribute from three years later... She starts to walk with her head down. She probably isn't going to be able to stay here too long.

She is just looking up in the direction of what she thinks must be the main bank when someone lightly bumps into her. In a flash her hand is on the person's arm, ready to twist it up and around, ready to attack, but just as quickly, the person's other hand is on hers, countering her.

She looks up.

"Johanna Mason," he says slowly, his dark eyebrows knit together.

"Gale Hawthorne," she says, releasing her grip and putting her hands on her hips. She looks him up and down with a mocking grin.

He still stands straight, with the military bearing drilled into him in District 13, but everything else about him looks worn down. The tired skin around his eyes shows her he isn't sleeping any better than the rest of them.

"I forgot you work here now," she says, still smiling. "Operation office of interior technical transport communication something or the other, right?"

"Deputy Director of Communications, Office of Interior Development," he corrects her.

"So exactly what I said. A string of nonsense words."

He doesn't seem sure what to make of her.

"What are you doing here?" he asks instead of responding.

"Visiting. Exploring. Looking for a bank."

"Right there," he says, nodding in the direction of the building she was heading towards.

"Thanks," she says with another dark smile, just to watch him squirm. "See you around, cousin."

She doesn't wait to see his reaction to that, just walks off quickly in the direction he indicated.

* * *

><p>She takes out all the money she can and leaves half of it at the Children's Center in town. There is a loosely affiliated group of centers that are forming throughout all the districts for the many children who have been left without parents or guardians or homes after the rebellion, and she has seen most of them. They are getting plenty of funding from the government – she thinks that Gale might actually be involved in that somehow – but it makes her feel better to give them what she can in each of the districts she has visited.<p>

She walks around the district some more looking for a place to buy a shirt. The district seems to be comprised mostly of blocky grey concrete buildings and is almost oppressively ugly, but the concrete seems to have withstood the trials of the rebellion better than most. It is the most functional district she has seen, but she is still starting to think that two nights here is going to be one night too many. It is too claustrophobic here.

Johanna walks into a bar she finds advertising food on a makeshift sign in the window. She sits down at the bar and nods at the bartender, who meets her gaze with a flash of recognition and just a little fear.

"Hey Mack," she says. She calls all bartenders Mack these days.

"Get me a glass of that," she nods at one of the bottles lining the bar behind him, "and whatever you have to eat here."

Her food is just being set down in front of her when the opening door catches her eye. She sees Gale come in, notice her sitting at the bar, and hesitate for a second as if he is going to walk right back out. She laughs to herself.

He goes to sit at one of small tables filling the room behind her with a curt nod in her direction. She can tell from the way he is awkwardly seating himself that he normally sits at the bar. That her being there has disrupted his usual pattern.

She enjoys how uncomfortable she clearly makes him.

She hands the man behind the counter a couple extra coins at the end of her surprisingly good meal.

"Whatever he's having," she says, glancing back toward Gale, "is on me."

She walks out of place and into the night without acknowledging him at all.

* * *

><p>She is awake early the next morning and decides to walk away from town, toward the direction that looks wilder, like there might be trees. She tries to find a forest or a wood or even a copse of trees everywhere she goes, and sometimes it makes her wonder why she ever left District 7. But the second she starts to think about home – not her house in Victors Village, her real home, where she grew up – she remembers why.<p>

It takes her a couple of hours, but she soon realizes that this whole cement town center is part of a village in a string of villages that was carved out of a large forest that is ready at any second to take back it's space. She doesn't have to go too far until she is in a wilderness that feels much more like home to her than any room in any building ever could.

She breathes in the pine scented air of the forest she has found and immediately starts to feel better about the district, about her terrible night's sleep, about how she couldn't force herself into the shower that morning. She wanders through the sun dappled space slowly, always looking out for trees with low branches that she could easily reach if something she didn't want to see came running out of forest.

She has spent at least an hour wandering when she gets a sudden feeling that something isn't right. She melts into the shadows of a small group of trees, quietly pulling her knife out of her boot, when she sees a silently moving shadow slip behind another tree.

She starts to move toward it when something grabs her from behind, and she finds a man's arm around her neck. She moves instantly, stabbing the hand shallowly while elbowing him sharply in the gut and dropping down, out from under his grasp. She spins quickly only to be laid out on the ground as his long leg sweeps her feet out from under her.

She grunts as the air is forced out of her lungs, finally looking up to see her attacker.

"Gale fucking Hawthorne," she spits out as she rolls up slowly, testing her arm and her tailbone. "If I didn't know better, I would say that you are stalking me."

"Johanna Mason," he says as he gingerly probes the side that she elbowed, getting blood from his hand onto his shirt.

"You know that I am the one who lives here, right? If anything it would be the other way around."

He sits down slowly next to her, examining his hand with a grimace.

"Oh stop whining, it is barely a scratch," she says, looking at him looking at his hand.

She picks up her knife from the forest floor and cuts a slit a couple of inches up from the hem of her shirt. She rips the strip all the way around, leaving her shirt two inches shorter than it was before, showing peeks of her skin above her pants. She rinses his hand with his water bottle, then efficiently bandages his cut. She notices him looking at her while she does it, but she can't read the look in his grey eyes.

"Move your fingers," she orders him. He does.

"See, barely a scratch."

"What are you doing here anyway?" she asks after a second where they both sat in silence, catching their breath and letting their heart rates come down to normal. "Don't you have an important job to be doing? Mr. Big Shot?"

"It's Sunday," he says. "The office isn't open on Sundays. People only work five days a week around here.

She says "oh" quietly. She had no idea what day of the week it was. For the first time in a long time she starts to wonder what she is doing, and what she is going to do.

"I like to go into the woods on my day off," he continues. "It reminds me of..." he pauses for a moment with a faraway look. "Home, I guess."

"Plus it is important for the government to get a better idea of the woods that surround the district," he says in the brisk, business like tone she has heard him use on television. "There are important resources out here and very little information..."

"Right," she says as he falters. "I get it."

She take a long sip of water from his water bottle, then rocks up on her heels to stand, pausing first to stretch her back.

He takes his water bottle back, and she watches as he carefully wipes the mouth of it on his shirt before he takes a sip.

He reaches a hand out toward her head, but she ducks away and stands up quickly.

"I thought you wanted to keep that hand," she says looking down at him with narrowed eyes.

"You have a leaf in your hair," he says, exasperated. "Calm down."

They are on a little bit of a hill, so when she leans over to brush her hands roughly through her hair, he can see that she is off balance. He isn't sure what makes him do it, but right before she straightens back up again, he gives her a small push.

She stumbles a step to the side before she goes down.

She turns to face him, still on the ground, anger sparking from her eyes.

"What the _fuck_," she snaps as she turns toward him. But when she looks up, she sees him grinning at her for just a second until his face falls back into its usual sober mask. She realizes that she doesn't think she has ever seen this serious young man smile. It suits him.

"It's just my back," she says, wincing a little as she puts one hand carefully on her side, still lying in the dirt. "Ever since the Capitol..."

She trails off, and he gets up in a second, offering his left hand to her with a worried look.

"Oh shit, I didn't think-"

He is cut off as she uses the slope of the hill to pull him towards her and flip him over her with her feet. She gets up easily, standing over him.

"Don't mess with a con artist," she says, as she walks off, leaving him in the dirt.

When she gets back to the boarding house, she pays for her room for the next full week.


	14. 1 II I

1. II.I

Gale pushes himself away from his desk with a tired sigh. He had a long week, having had to give two press conferences, and is ready to get out the door. Plus his dreams of a perpetually burning district filled with screams have only been getting worse as the weeks have gone by, not better.

He wishes that they would just let him sit in the office and figure out the logistics, do the problem solving that he is good at, but he knows that he only has this prominent position in the government because of his relationship to Katniss, and they need him for his face. He wonders if there will ever be a time when his relationship with Katniss, a person who doesn't want anything to do with him, will no longer be the most important thing about him. It certainly doesn't seem like it will be anytime soon.

He looks at his watch and sighs again. It is already four o'clock, he is going to be late. He grabs the folder of papers he was leafing through, stuffs them into his bag, and runs out the door with a quick nod to Beecher and Penny. Everyone knows that he leaves early on Fridays and no one says anything about it. They see how hard he works the rest of the week. Mostly they hope that he is doing something to relieve the pain that everyone can see he is insistent on holding on to.

Gale runs home, dropping off his stuff and changing out of his suit and into a white t-shirt and an old pair of military fatigues. He feels better already. He slams right back out the door grabbing a jacket on his way and half walks, half runs his way to the Children's Center. He is panting a little when he is met at the door by the kind looking woman who all the kids call Miss Izzy wiping her hands on the apron she has on over her skirt.

"Sorry I'm late," he says as he walks into the Center behind her.

"Oh you know it's no problem Gale," she smiles back at him as she pulls a couple escaping strands of her hair back into her ponytail. "We were just cleaning up from snack time, and then it is already time to start making dinner. I swear, all these children do is eat!" But she laughs good naturedly as she says it.

"Are you still getting more kids?" he asks as they walk down a hallway lined with study rooms.

"It's slowing down," Isobel responds, her normally cheerful face more serious. "We only had two new children come to us this week."

"Good," Gale nods. At least it looks like they are getting a handle on one problem. With so many throughout the new Republic, it feels good to get a handle on something.

"Oh!" Isobel continues in her usual tone. "We actually had another volunteer come in this afternoon to help build the play structure, so you will have some help. I am sure it will be finished in no time!"

There is a sinking sensation in Gale's chest that is somewhere between anticipation and dread. Another volunteer? He has a feeling he knows who it is.

They round another corner and go through the large double doors that lead to the large play area the center has outside. He sees her in the middle of the grassy field, the late afternoon sun shining on the red highlights in the hair that is just long enough to fall into her face. She is wearing the same pants and white t-shirt that he had seen her in before and is quickly sawing even lengths of two by fours.

"Johanna Mason," he says with something like resignation in his voice.

"Oh, of course you two must know each other," Miss Izzy says cheerfully. "I don't know what I was thinking. I really don't know how to thank you both enough."

Johanna looks up as she hears the two of them come closer, squinting into the sunlight and tossing her bangs out of her face.

"Of course," she mutters as she sees that Gale is the other volunteer all the Children's Center staff had been gushing about as they showed her what could still be done around the place.

"Johanna Mason," he nods to her as they get into earshot.

"Well, I will leave you two to it," Isobel says as she turns to go back inside. "The children are so excited about the play structure."

Gale had turned to nod goodbye to Miss Izzy and as he turns back around, Johanna tosses a hammer at him, probably a little harder than she needed to. He juggles it lightly to keep from dropping it.

"You might as well get started nailing this railing together," she says as he comes closer. "Then we just have to put the legs on this platform, put the railing around it, attach this other crap," she gestures with her saw at the metal and plastic prefabricated pieces of the play structure that are strewn around her, "put that little house thing on the platform, and then it should be done."

He nods and gets to work.

They work together quietly and efficiently, falling into an easy rhythm as they pass tools, nails, and screws back and forth. Even though the spring evening is still cool, Gale starts to sweat as they work to lift the platform into place, the satisfying sweat of working with his hands. When he stops to wipe his face with the bottom of his shirt, he catches Johanna looking at him, but he isn't sure how to read the look in her eyes.

They finally stop for the night when the fading light becomes too weak for either of them to see what they are working on clearly.

Johanna stands up and stretches back, unleashing a series of pops as she cricks her neck.

"Where do the tools go?" she asks him.

"That shed," he says as he starts gathering them up.

She helps him, shaking her head. He understands. He also still isn't used to having access to tools and machines without the steady gaze of a Peacekeeper watching to make sure everything is locked away under a Capitol seal.

As they head back inside, Gale realizes that he hasn't eaten since breakfast and is incredibly hungry. That stupid conference call with Plutarch about television advertisements ran so long, he ran out of time to eat. As if there weren't more important issues right now than bringing back television advertisements.

As if reading his mind, Johanna rubs a hand across her stomach, saying "Man, I need something to eat."

"I can't believe we didn't finish that thing," she continues as they walk through the hallways filled with children running up and down the stairs laughing, yelling, and crying about homework, toys, who took who's dessert.

"Well, you did take forever cutting each of those railings exactly right," he says.

"Sorry I don't want to do a half assed job like you clearly wanted to," she shoots back. "Besides, if you hadn't wasted a half hour trying to fit that thing of metal bars onto the back of the platform, we would have been much farther along."

"How was I supposed to know kids are supposed to hang off the bottom of the thing and not climb up it? We didn't have fancy toys like this where I grew up."

"Neither did we, but why else would it only have legs on one side? I thought you were supposed to be some sort of brainiac, Mr. Big Shot."

"It was a more creative way of looking-"

He is cut off by a little girl, running up to them while she yells.

"Johanna Mason? Is that really you?" The little girl is probably eleven or twelve, with pretty, dirty blond hair, and the remains of a Capitol lilt in her speech.

"Sure is," Johanna says with a smile, but Gale can tell that she is uncomfortable.

"I can't believe it!" the girl cries excitedly. "You were always my favorite. Because you beat all those bigger kids. All on your own. I was always you when we played Tribute!"

"Aw, thanks darling," Johanna says as she bends down, but Gale can see barely contained panic in her eyes. "What's your name?"

"Helena," the girl says, suddenly shy.

"That is a beautiful name," Johanna says, still smiling, as she nervously fidgets with the jacket in her hands.

"We have to go or else we are going to be late for dinner," Gale breaks in as Johanna clearly struggles to find something else to say. "It was very nice to meet you Helena. Will you tell Miss Izzy that we had to leave but that I will be back to finish the play set tomorrow?"

Helena nods, awed by the man she had seen on television actually speaking to her.

Gale takes the lead now and practically pulls Johanna out of the Children's Center. It scares him a little to see her so rattled, so he leads them to the closest bar he can think of and sits her down at a small table.

He orders them two drinks and two dinner specials before sitting down expectantly across from her.

"So?" he asks. "What was that?"

Their drinks are placed in front of them by the waitress, and Johanna downs one and then the other in quick succession before giving her head a quick shake.

"That was mine..." he says as she puts the glass down with a sharp clink, then just sighs and orders another round.

Johanna looks a little better.

"That hadn't happened in a while. And definitely not since the vote..." she says slowly, looking down at the table.

"Vote?" he asks.

"What?" She looks up at him. "Oh, nothing. I guess I had just forgotten what that was like. Capitol kids."

"It was actually a game in the Capitol, you know? Kids played "Tribute," there were trading cards, everyone had a favorite... What do you say to a kid who loves you because of everything you hate about yourself? Who doesn't even know what you would have done..."

She trails off, looking up at him with a pleading sadness in her eyes that only makes him angrier.

"It's despicable is what it is. How can they watch another child, terrified and injured, on television and not think that it was horrible?"

"I don't know," she says slowly, swirling the new drink that has been placed before her. "That's how things were to them. That's how they were raised. Who can say if you would have been any different if that was the only thing you knew? It wasn't real to them, the things on the television, and they were told it was necessary to keep everyone else safe. Plus it was such a spectacle. Everyone around them was so excited by it."

"But that girl has lost all the family she has ever known in a rebellion designed to get rid of that very thing, and she is still excited by my celebrity..." Johanna shakes her head, still looking down at the brown liquid in her glass.

Gale is starting to think that there might be more to this woman than a deadly smile and a razor sharp tongue. He isn't sure he actually knows anything about her.

"At least it will never happen again," she says with more force, sitting up straighter in her chair, shaking off what just happened. The abstracted look in her eyes is replaced by something harder and more familiar.

He sees the dark smile come back just then as she leans forward over the table, focusing her attention on him.

"So," she pauses, letting him know that they have moved on. "That's how you deal with it, huh soldier? You work as hard as you can all week, and then you work another full shift trying to help all the kids you can because of the one little girl you couldn't save. Is that it?"

No, he was right the first time, just killer smiles and razors.

He narrows his eyes as he looks at her, ready to fight her fire with fire, ready to flip the entire table over in hurt rage over her bringing up something that he won't let himself even think about until it is too dark and too late to get himself to stop. He looks at her, goading him into a fight with her mocking smile, trying to figure out where she can hurt him the most the quickest, and he realizes that he is tired of fighting. He doesn't want to try and figure out where her weaknesses are and how to exploit them. He has fought enough for one lifetime. Besides, he saw the anonymous donation come into the Children's Center the day she arrived, and he saw her work just as hard as he did today. For all her talk, she is making her own reparations in her own way for whatever sins weigh most heavily on her.

"Yeah, I guess so," he just says tiredly, rubbing his hands over his face.

She pauses.

"It's no fun if you don't fight back," she says, her voice softer now.

"That's what I was hoping." He leans away from the table as the waitress places their food down in front of them.

They eat in silence for a couple of minutes.

"What about you, anyway," he says, waving his drink in her direction. "Are you just going to keep wandering from district to district forever trying to run away from the past? You could help the new government you know."

Maybe he isn't done fighting after all.

"I have done my duty," she hisses through her teeth, violently stabbing a baby carrot on her plate. "I don't owe any more."

"No one is saying you do," he says. "But are you going to be happy trying to outrun something that is part of you?"

He knows that he isn't one to talk, hiding out in District 2 while his family in District 13 tries to make it back to 12, but he also knows that he is right. And he is doing important work here. And making the kind of money he wouldn't even have been able to dream of before. And that is more helpful to Rory and Vick and Posy than anything he could do... His mind runs quickly through the well worn grooves of the arguments that he uses with himself almost every day.

"Happy," she laughs mirthlessly. "Just like you are right?"

"I'll bet you liked school," he says. He can see the confusion in her face at this sudden topic change.

"I liked math," she says thoughtfully taking a long sip of her drink. "Hated science. _Hated_history."

"Because they didn't make any sense, right?"

She looks up at him, surprised.

"You would ask questions about the obvious holes in what they were telling you, and they wouldn't answer you."

"Yeah..." she says looking at him suspiciously.

"I watch people," he says with a shrug. "You were good at military history and tactics. You always asked the right questions."

"No," she says, "you watched her. I just happened to be in the way."

"Maybe," he says, "but I'm right. And I think I am right that you would be good at a lot of the stuff that still needs to be done to make this government work. They have all these books, tons of them, from the Dark Days and from before that. There is so much information out there that we were never allowed to see before. You have no idea."

She makes a non committal noise as she finishes the last of her drink. She gets up, pulling her jacket on and dropping some coins on to the table. He can tell that she is watching to see if he is going to say anything, and he wants to, she is the last person he wants to owe anything. But he forces himself to stay quiet as he grabs his coat and follows her out the door. He isn't going to rise to her bait.

They walk quickly through the dark streets out of force of habit even though no one would stop them now, pausing for a moment at the turn off for his street.

"'Night, Johanna Mason," he says before he turns. He isn't sure why, he has never been one for manners or social niceties. He just didn't want to let her go without saying anything.

She spins on one foot and walks back toward him.

"Why do you do that?" she asks.

"What?"

"Always say my full name."

He pauses to think about it. He hadn't noticed, but maybe he always did.

"It _is_ your name," he says under his breath. "I don't know why. I guess that's just how I have always heard it."

He raises his voice into a passable imitation of Claudius Templesmith. "Tribute from District 7, Johanna Mason!" His voice goes back to normal. "Victor from District 7, Johanna Mason. Mentor from District 7, Johanna Mason..."

"Well I am not any of those things anymore," she says, suddenly very close to him. "So stop it."

He looks down at her, feeling the heat from her body, holding his ground. Had she always been so small? In his mind, she always took up so much space, but standing this close to her, she looks so delicate, her skin smooth and luminous in the moonlight, and she barely comes up past his shoulder.

"Come up for a second," he says, not breaking eye contact. "I'll give you that book I was talking about on the history of the old government."

She arches an eyebrow, looking at him for a minute, before reaching quickly between his legs. His heart jumps into his throat, but he doesn't let his body betray him. He is too good of a hunter for that.

There is something deliciously dangerous about having her so close to him, so close to the most delicate part of him.

"At ease, soldier," she whispers into his ear, hand still firmly between his legs. "I don't play with children."

"That's good," he whispers back. "I haven't been a child for years. Besides, what are you? Two years older than me? I don't think it matters when you feel a hundred years old."

She laughs, her breath hot against the side of his face, and lets him go.

"'Than I.'"

"What?" He always feels off balance around her.

"It's 'two years older than I.' 'Than I am old.'"

Now it is his turn to laugh.

"I told you you liked school," he says, tilting her face up so that she is looking up at him. He cocks his head a little to the side as he looks at her, then goes and drops his mouth down on hers.

She tastes sweet and wild and a little bit alcoholic.


	15. 1 II II

1 .

Johanna feels his kiss run through her in an instant and settle between her legs. She knows she was daring him, but somehow it is still unexpected.

He tastes smoky and sweet and infinitely familiar, and when he runs a hand down to her lower back, bringing her even closer to him, her entire body thrills.

They are at his door in what seems like a second, and she slips a hand under the waistband of his pants as he fumbles with his keys.

"You certainly don't get girls because of your decorating skills," she breathes as he basically carries her into his apartment. "It looks like a creepy loner who was recently robbed lives here."

His television sits directly on the ground, across from the one piece of real furniture in the place, a clearly secondhand and very ugly couch. There is a cheap folding table covered in papers by the window, and a cardboard box that is serving the place of a side table sits next to the couch, topped with a half filled glass of water.

"Nope," he says as he pins her against the wall with her legs wrapped around his waist and runs a trail of kisses down her neck.

She sighs, throwing her head back and running her hands through his thick, dark hair. Her fingers brush points of ridged scar tissue as they run down his neck.

"And then you bring some other girl home and fuck her and try to forget everything and everyone and especially her, right?" she whispers softly into the top of his head.

He rears back, his face dark and steely as he looks at her.

"Why do you pretend to be such a bitch?"

"Who says I'm pretending?" she asks, matching his stare even though the look he is giving her scares her a little.

"I know you are," he says as he grips her under her legs and carries her in the direction of his couch.

"Maybe I am just having a little fun."

She runs her tongue along his ear as he dumps her on the arm of the couch.

"Maybe I don't like your type of fun," he whispers back, hiking her shirt up as she fumbles and eventually succeeds with the buttons of his pants.

He rips her pants down, and spins her around so she is bent over the arm of the couch. He runs one hand all the way down her front until it is between her legs, feeling how excited she is with one finger while he uses his other hand to pull her hair, arching her back towards him. She gasps.

"I think," she inhales sharply as she guides him into her, "actually, you do," she lets out in a sigh.

He groans softly as he thrusts into her, powerful and satisfying. Her fingers dig deeply into the rough fabric of his couch.

It feels so good and so right she doesn't want it to stop, but at the same time she wants the sweet release of what is building inside of her. She tightens around him, moaning quietly because she can't stop herself, and takes one hand off the couch to play with herself in time with him.

When she feels his long strokes shudder with something barely being kept in, she can't stop it, and let's herself be overcome with the release of everything that had building up inside of her since before she even knew it. She can't stop the noises she is making, especially as he groans again, rough and guttural in her ear, and his hand presses firmly, involuntarily, into the soft flesh of her breast, marking red indentations in her pale skin.

He collapses a little on top of her as he finishes, pushing her into the hard arm of the couch, but she likes the feeling of his warmth pressed against the length of her, his hair tickling her bare skin. As soon as she catches her breath again, she laughs out loud.

"Nice one Hawthorne," she says as she flips over under him, grabbing his chin and kissing him lightly.

She slips out under his arm and pulls up the pants that were pooled around her ankles. Neither of them had taken off their boots. They both knew the other kept a knife in theirs.

"That was unexpected," Gale says from the couch, where he had basically rolled as she moved out from under him. He has pulled his pants back up, but they are still undone, and his shirt is in a pile by the door.

"What?" She asks from the kitchen, where she is filling a glass of water at the sink.

"All of it," he says, not moving. "You. Your underwear…"

"What?" She looks down at her underwear, which is soft and lacy and a dusty pink. "What the hell are you talking about? What were you expecting? What were you doing thinking about my underwear?"

He looks embarrassed for a second.

"I wasn't. I – just – uh... I guess I was expecting black and spikes and chains or something."

She laughs.

"That's just for when you're bad."

She walks over to pick her jacket up off of the floor, drinking deeply from the glass.

"You aren't staying?" he asks quietly.

She laughs again. "No."

"Let me walk you to your room then," he says as he starts to do up his pants.

"I can handle myself," she says as she walks over to him, handing him the half full glass with a dark smile. "I don't need anyone to protect me."

Right before she opens the door that leads back out to the cold cement hallway of the building, she turns back to him.

"Finish the play structure tomorrow morning?"

He nods with a smile that he manages to hold in until he hears the door close behind her.

She walks back to the boarding house quickly, the insides of her thighs sticky and a humming energy running through her body.

She doesn't realize until she is toweling off her hair in the safety of her own room that she got into the shower quickly, unthinkingly, for the first time since before the arena.


	16. 1 III

1. III

They finish the play structure the next morning in an hour and walk back to his place together without question, as if they had decided it ahead of time.

Afterward, she wanders into the kitchen in her underwear and his t-shirt and pokes through all the drawers and cupboards. There is nothing in his fridge but one sad beer and a jar of mystery condiment, but his cupboards are stocked with rice and dried beans and rows of canned goods.

He finds her sitting on the counter with one leg dangling down, eating dry granola right out of the box.

"You have nothing good in your kitchen," she says as he comes in.

He takes a handful of granola from the box in her hands.

"That's not true. Just because you have the kitchen skills of my six year old sister doesn't mean there is nothing good in here."

She pelts him with a piece of cereal, and when he turns to her with a wide grin, she feels something strange contract in her stomach, not unpleasantly.

* * *

><p>She starts spending more and more time at his place every time she goes over there.<p>

A couple of times she brings him to her room in the boarding house, the landlady's grim looks as they pass making them laugh together every time. One night he stays, taking up too much space in her bed, but after she is sure he is asleep, she curls her body around his, and she likes the way it feels.

They learn things about each other.

That he won't eat strawberries or blackberries. That she can split logs so easily it makes him think that there are seams in the logs that he can't see. That she likes her coffee thick with sugar and that he doesn't like his at all. That he can do a handstand forever and when he smiles large enough, one dimple shows up on his right cheek. That when she laughs for real, she does it with her whole body.

But other things too. Bigger things that they don't realize they are telling each other.

Sometimes he disappears for days, driving the car that he gets for government business as fast as it will go on twisting mountain roads or sleeping out in the woods instead of at home with just the small knife in his boot for protection.

Sometimes she doesn't leave her room, not sleeping, not eating, just sitting in the dark alone with her thoughts.

One time she gets an electric shock from the metal doorknob on his front door, and she falls back instantly, curled and shaking on the ground, and he carries her back to his bed, quietly smoothing the hair back from her forehead until she relaxes enough to fall asleep.

Once, when she is sleeping next to him, he sits up with a start, screaming out Her name, and he sobs, deep, wracking sobs while she rubs her hand steadily down his back.

Once he is woken by her shaking him saying "I'm sorry. I wasn't there. I'm sorry. I should have been there," as she cries.

He always keeps a glass of water by the bed, and sometimes she wakes up to find him gasping and gulping it down, the memories of fires burning in his eyes.

One of those times he turns to her with his hands open and a helpless look on his face.

"What am I? What did I become?"

She runs her hands tiredly through her hair as she sits up a little.

"Ggguh," she groans, "do they put something in the water in District 12 or something? What is it with you guys constantly trying to put everything on yourselves? You survive, you move on, you stop bitching about it."

"It isn't all about you. The choices you had to make, that we all had to make, they aren't choices that anyone should ever have to even think about. How many times do we have to talk about who the enemy really is? It sure as hell isn't you, Soldier Hawthorne. You have to forgive yourself for what was and what wasn't and what could have been. Do you forget what we did? What you did? What you are still doing? We made sacrifices, huge sacrifices..." She pauses for a second, eyes closed.

"But ultimately, we have to think they were worth it. Because this world is going to be different."

"If she blames you, it's because it's easier that way," she finishes more quietly. "But not because it's right. She'll figure it out, it just hurts too much right now.

They never talk about it in the morning.

* * *

><p>One night they are both lying face down on his mattress, her head on his shoulder blade, her body extended out at an angle from his. The bright moonlight from his curtainless window is the only light. She runs her hands down his back to the edge of where the sheet crosses his body, then traces the ridges of the pale stripes that run diagonally across his back.<p>

"Poaching," he says quietly, turning his face toward her.

She lightly fingers the dark vertical scar on his other shoulder.

"Shrapnel. When we got you and Annie and Peeta."

She touches the puckered starburst of a gunshot wound.

"Peacekeeper. Last day in the Capitol." He squeezes his eyes shut for a second.

She touches the small break on the back of his head where no hair grows.

"Wild dog. Came out of nowhere. Fell back over an outcropping of rock."

She runs her hands up to a shallow scar on his upper arm.

"Falling rock in the mine."

And up farther to the just healing pink cut on his hand.

"Crazy girl stabbed me in the forest."

"Well you are just barely held together with scar tissue and tape, huh?" she whispers in his ear as she moves to straddle his back.

"Barely," he says, turning over between her legs so he is facing her.

He runs his hands over her entire body as she sits on top of him, from the puckered circular scars on her arms all the way down to the puckered circular scars on her legs.

"Electricity goes in, electricity has to come back out," she says as indifferently as she can, but he feels the tiny shiver that runs through her as she says it. There aren't that many scars on the body, they are all buried inside, so he leans up toward her, kissing her hard.

* * *

><p>One night he is trying to teach her to cook in his kitchen and figuring out pretty quickly that Johanna Mason does not like to be told what to do. He tried to show her an easier way to cut the onion she is struggling with and almost got another knife to the hand, so he just quietly starts to break down the bird he felt just a little guilty about buying from the butcher on the other side of the stove.<p>

"Did you know," she says as she brushes her bangs out of her eyes with the back of her wrist, "you can pay someone to do this for you? They have entire storefronts dedicated to that very thing. It's much more convenient."

"It is actually useful skill to have, being able to feed yourself," he says mildly as he expertly detaches the legs from the bird with a quick whack of his hand against the back to his knife.

"I am perfectly capable of-_little piece of shit!_" she yells, stabbing her knife straight down through the chunk of the onion that didn't manage to escape, pinning it to the cutting board.

He looks at her with laughter in his eyes, struggling to keep a straight face.

"Well you know Miss Mason-"

She was almost smiling at herself but her face goes dark in a second.

"Don't call me that," she says quietly.

The laughter drains out of his face as he looks at her carefully, appraisingly. But he only says "okay" and lets it go, filing that piece of information away with the others.

* * *

><p>Johanna lies back on Gale's couch, slowly leafing through the book he brought home from his office for her. He is sitting at the cheap folding table in the window, marking notes on the pages of food production statistics that are just coming out of District 11.<p>

Johanna sighs as she readjusts herself, her cracking back breaking the comfortable silence.

"You have to get rid of this couch," she say, turning back to look at Gale. "It is so ugly and uncomfortable, it is basically torture. And I should know a little something about torture."

Gale looks up from his work.

"No," he says before focusing back on the paper in front of him.

Johanna puts the book on the cardboard box behind her.

"You're right, we have to do something about all of this," she says. "It's pathetic. You have been living here for months and most of your stuff is just piled on the floor.

"There is nothing wrong with my apartment. Do you know what I paid for that couch?"

"If it was more than one copper cent…" Johanna mutters under her breath.

"It cost the beer I bought for Beecher to get him to help me get it up the stairs," he says triumphantly.

"That was still probably too much. Look, you can't keep pretending you are a coal miner who is going to go back to District 12. You are here, you are an adult, you have to start acting like one. I am going to buy it for you if that's what the problem is."

He doesn't say anything to that, and before he fully understands what is happening, he is in town, buying a soft grey couch and a neat little wood table at a store in the middle of town, spending more money than has ever spent at one time in his life. She had ideas about a whole mess of other things, but the dazed look on his face makes her let him off with just the two items.

The next week she comes to his apartment with a small bookcase and a matching side table, and he doesn't know what to say. He looks at the things carefully, the prettily turned legs, the smooth sheen of the natural grain of the wood, the elegance of both.

"We didn't see anything like this the other day," he says slowly.

"Oh," she shrugs, "I made them."

She says it so easily, but she knows that she hasn't made anything in years, at least not something that wasn't just to prove to the Capitol that she was doing something.

He turns to look at her with surprise and something else, something soft in his grey eyes.

"What?" She says back to his look. "It's just a side table, sheesh. I would have done a lot more to not have to look at that stupid cardboard box anymore."

He walks over and takes her in his arms and kisses her, and there is something effortless and tender in it that hadn't been there before.

* * *

><p>Gale runs down the stairs of the boarding house two at a time. He is going to be late, or more accurately, not as early for work, and he is still fumbling with his tie as he flings open the door, right into the flash of a tabloid news reporter's camera.<p>

He had gotten into trouble with them before, so now he just ignores them completely as he walks briskly to work. They must have finally figured out that Johanna is in District 2, suddenly making him more interesting again. He can only be glad that they didn't get a picture of the two of them together, but if they know where she is staying, it is only a matter of time.

That night they meet up in the woods just before it starts to get dark.

"You have to move," he tells her.

"I knew you were trouble," she says lying back on the soft carpet of pine needles. "I guess it's time to move on."

A quick fire runs through him, then he shakes his head to himself for thinking that she might have said anything else. He stays silent, smoldering, thinking that she can do what she wants, when suddenly he decides that he is sick of fighting, sick of thinking that holding everything in is protecting him from getting hurt.

"You should get an apartment here," he says quietly, not looking at her. "You should stay. The offer to work in the government still stands. You could choose whatever department you wanted."

She sits up, her back and hair covered in pine needles, and digs her hands into the loamy soil, as if to anchor herself.

"Stay..." she says quietly. She thinks about it, wondering what it would be like to try and make this concrete district her home. What it would be like to try and piece together what she could of herself and make all her fancy talk of worthwhile sacrifices and moving on actually into something. But she doesn't know what that would look like when she is burned through like a tree that has been struck by lightning but still insists on standing, hiding charred black paths of destruction on the inside.

"Yeah, stay," he says still quieter.

And suddenly she is furious at him for making her think about it. For making her think that anyone or anything could depend on her when she is barely standing herself. She sits up straighter and brushes her hand brusquely on her sides.

"No. I have to go."

He stiffens, then stands quickly and starts heading deeper into the forest.

"Where are you going?" she calls after him, still angry.

"What the hell do you care?" He has turned around to face her, towering and furious, and she hates how attractive she finds him. "You have to go, remember?"

"It's getting dark," she yells as she stands up. "Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

"Yes, _Johanna_," he hisses venomously as he steps toward her, "I am trying to get myself killed. I engage in self destructive behavior, _Johanna_. What do you think this," he waves his hand between the two of them, "was?"

He turns on his heel and walks silently into the dark arms of the forest while she stands, rooted to the spot, and screams in frustration.


	17. 1 Four

1. Four

Annie looks through the peep hole on her front door to see a figure with a spiky brown head uncomfortably scuffing the toe of one of her boots into the wood of the porch.

"Johanna!"

Annie throws open her door with a smile. She wasn't expecting her, but she isn't surprised to see her standing there.

The two women look at each other across the space between them, at the ways they have changed since the last time they saw each other. Annie is relieved to see that Johanna has put on some weight and that her skin has lost the grey pallor it had had in the hospital. There is some of her old mischievousness back in her face.

"Ugh," Johanna says breaking the silence as she walks through the door and throws her bag on the ground, "of course you are one of those women who only look more beautiful when they are pregnant. The world really isn't fair, no matter what anyone says."

Annie gathers the smaller girl into her arms, quieting her for a second.

"You look well," Annie says as she lets Johanna go and looks carefully at her. She brushes her hand lightly over the side of Johanna's cheek. "You look well."

Johanna coughs a little as she quickly swipes her wrist over her eyes.

"Well, you look stupidly beautiful and glowing when you should really just be huge. What are you, 7 months?"

"30 weeks," Annie says as she leads Johanna inside, grabbing her hand.

With the thought of what the time really means and the feel of Johanna's hand in hers, Annie pauses, suddenly unseeing, feeling the dark sweep of time going backward and constricting in her chest. Her knees are about to buckle, when she feels the baby inside her move slightly, and she remembers that she needs to pee.

She sees Johanna looking at her, concerned, but all the girl says is, "Okay, so we are quite done with that, right?"

"Yes," Annie smiles.

"You can stay in the blue room on the second floor," Annie continues easily.

Johanna is still looking at her a little warily, but seems to decide that if Annie is moving on, she is too.

"You know everyone in this whole district seems to know where you live, right? And that it is hours away from everything else?"

District 4 is long and thin, following the line of the ocean, and Annie had moved down south to where it is warmer, hours away from her parents' house and the old Victors Village and the main train station.

She had stayed in the Capitol after the vote, while Katniss' trial dragged on, trying to learn how to survive when the only thing that had been anchoring her to the world was gone.

She had stayed until Peeta finally left too, weeks after Katniss, and there was no one left in the Capitol despite the many people who were with her in the hospital in the aftermath of the war. The way Peeta had smiled, the true joy in his face, when he saw her smooth her hand over her just expanding stomach had been all she needed to see that the boy he had been was still there and was finding his way back.

She moved back to District 4 because she needed the water and needed to raise her baby near the water, but she had needed to get away a little too.

"I know it's a long trip. But I need to get a little farther away from… everything. I had never been this far south on land before, only seen it from the water.

"As for everyone knowing where I live… I think that they are just worried about me. But I have Arielle, and Dorsa moved down here too. And now you're here."

She shares her house with her sister, the only member of her family to survive the Rebellion, and Finnick's sister, who had lost her husband, is there almost every day. The three of them together are figuring out how to be a family as best they can.

"You'll get used to the sound. It can't touch you," Annie says quietly when she sees Johanna try to suppress a shudder at the sound of the water lapping up against the small breakwater that surrounds the lawn that extends behind Annie's house.

* * *

><p>One night the two of them are sitting out on the grass, looking out at the black water that glints periodically with flashes of reflected golden light.<p>

"So," Annie starts gently, "are you staying here permanently? You know that you are more than welcome. That room is yours."

Ever since Johanna showed up on her doorstep weeks ago, Annie hadn't asked any questions, just folded Johanna easily into the routines of her life, waiting for her to say something.

"Well I was at least going to wait until you popped that little sucker out," Johanna says, gesturing to Annie's belly.

"I'm glad you're here," Annie says as she smoothes a hand over her stomach. "He would have wanted you here. He would have wanted you in our baby's life."

Johanna sighs as she looks up at the starry sky. This place is just as imbued with memories of Finnick as she feared it was going to be, but somehow it is easier, with other people who remember and loved him too.

"But," Annie continues, probing gently, not letting her off the hook quite yet, "then you're going back to District 2?"

"What? No. Why would I do that? Maybe I will stay around here... I have to be best aunt, and I wouldn't want Arielle and Dorsa to get unfair advantage in the competition by always being around when I'm not."

"This doesn't have anything to do with Gale Hawthorne, does it?"

"What?" Johanna jerks her head so hard, her whole body moves. "Why would you think that? Who even told you about that? Not that 'that' was anything. What even made you think of that? Did that little shit talk to you? How does he know where I am?"

Annie laughs softly.

"You were kind of hot gossip for a while there Johanna. I think most of Pan – Pax Republic knows about that."

"Oh for fuck's..." Johanna puts her head in her hands and groans.

"Well, I guess I am just going to have to live a life of celibate solitude from now on. It'll probably be for the best anyway."

Annie looks carefully at Johanna in the half light from the house. Johanna's face is thoughtful and sad as she looks blankly out at the water.

"What if we invite him here?" Annie asks quietly.

Johanna turns to her with a look that would have been more appropriate if Annie had asked whether or not they should exhume President Snow's body and invite that to the house.

"Okay, okay," Annie laughs, throwing her hands up in defeat. "Forget I said anything."

"Annie?" Johanna says hesitantly after a long moment. "Are you going to be okay?"

"With the baby or with everything?"

"With the baby. Well, with everything I guess."

"You know, I think I am," Annie says slowly. "I have to, because there is this whole other person who depends on me. Everyone figured out a way to deal with it, you know? Some people drank or did drugs, you built those heavily guarded walls, walling some things in and most other things out-"

"If I wanted to be psychoanalyzed, I could have gone to my own head doctor," Johanna interrupts, but Annie continues, ignoring her.

"Finnick compartmentalized... You must have seen it right? The Finnick that you and I knew was not the one most people knew."

"Yeah," Johanna says quietly, "It was weird. Like his whole face would change."

"Right. But I was just bad at it. And the doctors are helping, certainly, but it's more than that. I can't squander this victory that was so dearly won because it was won for this generation. It was won for our child. So I have to do everything I can to make it worthwhile. Every day," she trails off.

Johanna seems to mull that over in her mind.

"Sometimes I miss him so much, Johanna," Annie says in a heart-rending voice while she starts to cover her ears in an all too familiar gesture. Sometimes it just comes over her like a wave, prompted by nothing, the knowledge that she will never see him again. That he will never smile that little half smile that he would right before he swiped a bite of her dessert or swatted her on the butt. That he will never again stand tall at the wheel of their boat, looking seriously off at the horizon. That he will never know his child. That she will never touch him again.

Johanna grips the arm that is closest to her and firmly pulls it down between them by the hand.

"I know," Johanna says quietly. "I do too."

Annie's arm slowly relaxes.

"I'm glad you're here," she says, bumping Johanna lightly with her shoulder.

* * *

><p>A couple of weeks later, there is a sharp rap at the door while Annie and Arielle are out on the boat.<p>

Johanna has found herself forging a tentative peace with the boat but doesn't see the need to push it, so she stayed back. She isn't sure if someone as pregnant as Annie should really be out on the high seas, but she has resigned herself to not fully understanding these District 4 people.

The first time they had tried taking her out on the boat, claiming that it was the fastest way to get into town, Johanna had stayed, a tense knot of barely contained terror, in the middle of the cabin, gripping a wood hand rail with white knuckles.

It had been interesting to see how the other three women had changed on the water, easy and relaxed as they flitted around the boat, efficiently handling it out from the cove into the open water. Even Annie, whose center of gravity must have been constantly changing walked gracefully back and forth, helping out where she could. They were all at home on the water.

Johanna had dry heaved off the side of the dock the second they got into the marina in town and walked the long road back to Annie's house.

Johanna opens the door casually, expecting one of the many slightly nosy neighbors that have been dropping by unannounced to leave food or baby gifts for the expectant mother, and is startled to see the tall figure of Gale Hawthorne awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot on Annie's porch.

"Hawthorne!"

Johanna is surprised into silence.

"Hey Johanna," he says sheepishly. "Annie, um. Annie called and, uh, invi-"

"That lying little bitch!"

Johanna goes out onto the porch, closing the door behind her.

"If she wasn't knocked up with Finnick's baby, I would slap that fucking crazy right out of her!"

Gale backs away from her as she threateningly cracks her knuckles.

"So. You have to leave," she says, turning to him.

He stiffens instantly.

"I don't think you really get a say in that. I was invited. By Annie. The owner of this house."

"Well she isn't here, and I am not going to let you in."

"Fine," he says, sitting down on the step. "I'll wait out here."

She turns to go back into the house, then turns again toward where his broad back is infuriatingly blocking the view off of Annie's porch. She opens her mouth, shuts it, and turns back toward the door. She gets one hand on the doorknob before she spins around again, walks back toward him, and kicks him in the back with her bare foot.

"Why did you come here?"

"Don't kick me."

She kicks him again.

"Don't tell me what to do."

He doesn't say anything. She rears back to kick him again, and he whirls around off of the step in an instant, catching her foot in his hands. His hands are as warm as ever.

"Let me go," she says, furious.

He drops her foot. They stand there, glaring at each other, she having the height advantage for once, when the fight goes out of her. She walks over to the other end of the step and sits down slowly. He sits back down where he was.

They stare silently out past the little road that leads back out to the main road from Annie's house, past the house across the street, to where they can just see glints of water through the trees.

"I'd never seen the ocean before," he says quietly.

"Gale," she says after a minute, "what are you really doing here?"

He looks at her for a second before turning back to the view in front of them. She wonders if she has ever just called him Gale before.

"I... don't know."

He turns to look at her again.

"Why did you go?"

She doesn't say anything.

She is upset, furious that he is here, ruining her haven. She had been trying so hard to stop thinking about him, especially at night, especially when she crawled into her bed alone, and now here he was, standing as straight and tall as ever. She wants to hit him and scream at him and hurt him, but even more than that she wants to bury herself in his chest while his arms wrap around her, feeling the scratch of his stubble against her cheek as she inhales the smoky, sweet, familiar scent of his skin.

"I missed you," he says so quietly she can barely hear it, putting it all out there for the last time.

She looks at him, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears.

"Why?" She asks, throwing her head back and burying a hand in her hair. "Can't you see what a fucking mess I am? Can't you see that all I am going to do is hurt you? Can't you see that it is better if you just get away?"

"You have no idea about the things I have done, the things I would have done. You have no idea what-"

"Someone once told me to remember who the real enemy was," he interrupts her. "That we were in an impossible situation. Someone once told me that the world was a better place now."

The face she turns to him is open with fear and pain and a sadness that reaches down to her very core.

"I don't know if I believe that."

"I would," he says, looking directly at her. "The person who told me that is pretty terrifying. It's in your best interest to listen to her. She almost always gets what she wants."

She laughs soggily, pauses, and reaches her hand out across the space between them. He meets her halfway, enveloping her smaller hand in his.

"She sounds like a bitch."

"She kind of is," he nods thoughtfully.

She tries to pull her hand out of his to hit him, but he won't let it go.

Just then the door opens behind them, and Annie catches them, holding hands across her front step.

"Oh, Johanna? I invited a guest to stay for a couple of days, so be nice to him, okay?" she says before backing out the way she came and closing the front door again.

"I am going to kill her," Johanna says with a smile.

* * *

><p>The next morning, Gale sits out on Annie's back porch alone, watching as the sun comes up over the water, cutting through the early morning mist. There is water everywhere, all around the house, all around the district, and it extends farther than the eye can see, awesome and beautiful. It makes him feel small, and there is something comforting in that. He understands why she had to come back, it is unlike anything he has ever seen.<p>

He hadn't spent much time with Annie before and feels more than a little like an intruder in this house of women and baby clothes and memories of a man he had only started to know. All he knows about Annie is what everyone else knows, that she is beautiful and a Victor and crazy. But he also knows that Finnick loved her, and that most people in the Capitol's clutches are not what they seemed to be, something he started realizing the first time he saw himself, the cousin, on a television screen.

He is startled out of his thoughts by Annie, coming up to him quietly and folding herself into the chair next to him with a grace that is at odds with her hugely pregnant body.

"Thank you for coming here," she says, her voice soft and musical. "I know it was hard."

What had surprised him was how it wasn't hard at all.

In the weeks after Johanna left, he had reverted to what he had been like when he first got to District 2, cold and angry and drunk most of the time he wasn't working. His coworkers had started tiptoeing around him in the office, not wanting to be the one caused him to blow up. He had started to wonder how far he was going to let himself fall after he had gotten into a screaming match that devolved into him ripping off his coat and tie as he threateningly walked toward one of the reporters at a press conference, and Kalliope, who had more than enough to worry about without his going off the deep end, had had to talk to him in her office. Everyone had been more than a little relieved when he had asked for some time off.

"It wasn't as hard as you think."

Annie smiles at him.

"She isn't just the role she plays, you know. She runs because she can, but once you're in, she loves just as fiercely as she does anything else. I know she would never admit it, but she missed you."

Gale looks at Annie carefully.

"I know. And I am pretty sure none of us are, Crazy Annie Cresta."

She laughs a little.

"It means a lot to me that you are here. It would have meant a lot to him."

He nods once in acknowledgement.

"He was a good man. I am proud to have been in his squad. I am proud to have been able to fight beside him," he pauses, wondering if he shouldn't have mentioned that.

"He liked you. Respected..." She trails off, looking into the distance and laughs at some conversation that only she can hear. But she is back in a second, looking at him like she can see something in that he can't see in himself. He gets the feeling that she sees a lot of things that other people don't, a lot of things that are more true than the things other people see.

"Come on, let's go inside. There's breakfast," is all she says as she unfolds herself from the chair and leads him to the kitchen.

* * *

><p>"She isn't crazy is she? Not really."<p>

Gale is sitting on the edge of the bed, talking to Johanna through the half open door of the bathroom.

"Annie?" Johanna asks as she walks back into the room, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.

"I don't know. Is it crazy to be affected by all the horrible shit that happens to you? Or crazy not to be? Or crazy to pretend that it doesn't when you relive it every day?"

She shrugs. It's a real question she doesn't know the answer to.

"But I think she is stronger than anyone gives her credit for."

Gale nods.

"I think so too."

"Did you love him?" He asks after a moment. He isn't sure what he is doing, what he is asking, but he has to know all the same.

She stops, her shirt in her hands, and turns to look at him.

"Really? That's what you're worried about? What does it matter?"

He doesn't say anything.

"Although he _was_ better looking than you, so I can see how you would be concerned..." She stops herself because he looks so serious.

"Of course I loved him. But not like that. It wasn't like that. We just..." She pauses, inundated with memories.

"It wasn't like that."

He nods again.

"Johanna?" he says after a minute, "I talked to my family a couple of weeks ago. They are going to move to 2."

She freezes for a second getting into the bed, and keeps her voice deliberately calm as she starts moving again.

"You're getting a house together?"

"No, they are going to move into Village 5, away from the city center. But I was thinking, maybe, that we could… That you could... That if you come back..." He takes a deep breath.

"We could get a place together."

He's not looking at her, twisting the sheet in his hand. She smiles a little to herself and her heart starts beating faster, but she would never let him see how much she wants to.

"I get complete control of all decorating decisions," she says as her only response.

He looks at her, eyes wide, a smile growing on his lips.

"I'm not actually stupid, you know. Contrary to what you seem to think."

She smiles as she crawls on top of him.

* * *

><p>Annie is sitting serenely in the middle of the living room, occasionally gripping the arms of the chair tightly, while the rest of the occupants of the house run distractedly around her.<p>

Arielle and Johanna are completely repacking the bag that had been packed for weeks, while Dorsa searches frantically for the _right_ baby blanket, a designation that distinguishes it from the other two already in her hands, and Gale gathers up everyone's coats and tries to herd them out the door.

"How do we get to the hospital?" Johanna asks.

"Well, the fastest way..." Arielle starts hesitantly, shrinking from Johanna's glare.

"Don't tell me. It's by fucking boat."

Johanna and Annie sit in the cabin, gripping each other tightly by the hand, unclear about who is comforting whom, while Gale sits up in the bow, reveling in the rush of the wind through his hair and carefully watching Arielle and Dorsa skillfully work their way around the boat.

They make it to the hospital, shiny and new, a group of some of the most famous people in the whole country, about to welcome another.

They are settling into the room the nurse had quickly led them to when Katniss' mother comes hurrying in, checking in on her newest patient.

Gale freezes when she comes in, wondering if he should leave, if she won't be able to see him, if all she will see is her daughter, or her other daughter, or a monster. But when she finally turns around and catches his eye, she just walks up to him, hugs him tightly, brushes the hair gently back from his forehead, motherly, and asks after his family. He hugs her back, and something else inside him, something hard, dissolves a little.

They are all learning to forgive, to live as best they can.

In the end, it is Annie and Arielle together, while the rest of them wait outside.

Johanna and Gale pace around the waiting room like caged animals, while Dorsa sits, her right leg tapping away with nervous energy in a way that Johanna finds too familiar.

The little boy they meet, _Kenn,_ Annie whispered, is beautiful and perfect, but not as beautiful as the pure joy and wonder in the face Annie turns up to them when she shows him to them.

They all understand. The children of this new world need names that are all their own. They can't be burdened with a lifetime of memories before they have a chance to make any of their own.

As they look all look down at him, filled with the hope that what they did was worth it, for this, Arielle calls him Kenn, Johanna calls him little sprout, Gale calls him little man, and Dorsa can only cry.


	18. And On

And On.

They don't talk about it, they don't even think about it, this sharp tongued girl and brooding boy who had given up their futures long ago. They live together because they didn't want to not see each other, but they don't try to define anything. They are just trying to make it from one day to the next through nights that don't belong to them.

So neither of them knows when it happens. Maybe it is when he picks up something pretty and useless just because he knows she will like it. Maybe it is when she finds herself picking up his shirt from the floor just for the comforting smell of him. Maybe it is when he finds her on the floor of their house with Posy, carefully explaining the importance of a load bearing wall in the dollhouse they are building. Maybe it is when she breaks into a smile at the sight of him. Maybe it is when he smiles back.

There are still days when he disappears and nights when he is gone, but he always comes back. She can tell from the darkness that clouds his face, the twig in his hair, the rock dust on his boots, that he did something stupid, reckless. But he always comes back. There are still times when she itches to move on, to run, so she does, sprinting as fast as she can through the roads on the edge of the village, weaving through trees, until she hangs over her knees panting, completely spent. But she always comes back. The first time he had run after her, running as fast as he could to keep up, yelling after her. When she had finally stopped, miles down the road, she looked at him silently while she gulped air back into her lungs, a little sad and apologetic and a little scared. It was only after they were sitting in the back of the empty truck she managed to flag down that she reached over to him and silently laced her fingers with his, pressing the length of their arms together. He doesn't go after her anymore, she always comes back.

Sometimes she lashes out, like a cornered animal, attacking wildly and recklessly with no thought of anything else. Sometimes he shuts down, dark and forbidding and stonily silent, letting nothing in and nothing out.

But they always come back.

* * *

><p>They make the house on the edge of town into a home, filled with more stuff than he could have imagined owning in two lifetimes, all of it beautiful.<p>

She does find a place in the burgeoning government to work, to help, in a different department, in a different building from Gale. They work hard, the two of them, as hard as they have ever worked, the only way they know how. And when they go home, they know that someone will be there, ready to agree that Plutarch is a pompous ass, that the District 5 council can make all the demands they want, but District 6 can only produce vehicles so fast, that there is no point in doing something if you aren't going to do it right.

* * *

><p>The doctors tell her that they don't think that she can get pregnant. "Not with the elec- everything…" the doctor had said, refusing to look her in the eye. She could have laughed at how terrified he looked, this import from the Capitol working among the district people. She was sure that any sudden movement from her would have had him running out of the room, so she reached across him for her jacket a little faster than she had needed to. He had flinched.<p>

She tells herself that this has no effect on her, that she didn't want children anyway, not with everything she has seen, but she hates that it is no longer her choice, that this is one more thing the Capitol has taken away from her. The flash of sadness she sees in Gale's eyes when she tells him fills her with a white hot rage that she pours out at him.

"As if I care! As if I want to bring a child into this world. They did me a fucking favor! You want to knock me up? Make me into your little _wife_?" She spits the word out with disgust. "Well you can't. So you should probably go find yourself some sweet, spineless little girl who still has all of her parts in working order. I am sure it wouldn't be too hard for you Mr. Big Shot, Mr. _Television Star-_"

But he just gathers her up in his arms, runs his fingers through her hair until her rigid body relaxes against his.

"You're all I want," he says into her hair. But he sees the way that she is with Kenn, the way her whole body seems to relax, the gentleness he had never seen before, the joy in her smile when his little hand had gripped her finger, and he is sad.

* * *

><p>They are dedicating the new technical institute that they have built in District 3 to Wiress and Fil in a ceremony that is almost certain to be over the top and terrible, but Gale still insists on going. He wants to see it, a real institute of higher education in one of the districts, the first of many. A real opportunity that never would have been possible before.<p>

He still talks to Beetee on the phone, usually at the office or when Johanna isn't home, not secretly exactly, but privately, for help or advice or ideas. For the times when he needs someone slightly more patient and less insulting than the girl he lives with.

So they go. Johanna grumbles about cameras and the certain weirdos that will populate "Nuts U.," but she is the one who insists on going over a day early, renting the small house near Beetee for an extra night. She leaves him that afternoon, saying only that she is going exploring, and he goes to visit Beetee alone. The rush of patiently explained logic even just on mundane seeming logistical problems makes him feel better, calmer, like things can be done.

The next day, at the end of the ceremony that was just as ridiculous as he had thought it was going to be, filled with just as much hot air and skewered with just as many snide comments from Johanna as he was expecting, he still feels lighter. He laughs as Johanna makes bitingly accurate comments about the suit the newly appointed school President, clearly a former Capitol citizen, wore in his attempt to look appropriately scholarly but also blend in to the district. They are slipping behind the crowd on the large green lawn in front of the main building, heading away from the many cameras and back toward a side street.

"Right, I'm sure he picked out that hat all, 'district people love brown, right? But also, it looks-'"

His smile dies on his lips as they round the corner because there it is, right in front of him, the distinctive dark braid. And there he is too, right next to it, right next to her, holding her hand tightly.

Katniss and Peeta turn around when they hear the noise of someone behind them, and suddenly they are all face to face for the first time since – for the first time since the world ended, shattered, and came back together as something completely new. The two of them stand tall, the matching scars that lick the edges of their faces no longer red and angry but part of them, their eyes sad but clear.

Katniss and Gale's eyes are locked together, grey to grey, searching each other. He doesn't know why he didn't think of it, of course they would be here too. She has been able to go on certain approved trips for months. It was big news, he had given the announcement to the press himself.

Johanna's lazy smirk and relaxed pose is betrayed only be the quick flick of her eyes, back and forth between the two of them as she watches them both intently, sizing up the situation, waiting to see how and when to attack.

But Peeta just takes the two of them in, and in a second he is crossing the space between them all, enveloping Johanna into a hug, a real hug. She is startled for a second before she relaxes, taking in the strength that she can feel back in his arms, the emotion in the voice that sounds like his again as he says her name. He is whole, as whole as he can be, and so is she.

They know each other intimately, more intimately than two people should know each other. They know each other's screams and they know each other's secrets, and suddenly she finds herself crying against his shoulder, wondering when she became this person who cries all the damn time.

For once it is Katniss who finally breaks the silence, saying the right thing.

"So, what do you think? Do we need to be worried here?" she asks as she cocks her head in Gale's direction. Gale isn't sure where to look or what to do, if he should be more worried about his seeing Katniss or Katniss seeing him or Johanna seeing them together or Katniss seeing him and Johanna together.

Peeta and Johanna break apart as Johanna barks out a wet laugh.

"As if I would want anything to do with this mangled, gimpy-" She stops as Peeta shoves her lightly. He runs a hand awkwardly through his hair before offering it to Gale, who shakes it stiffly.

Johanna grabs Peeta's arm.

"C'mon," she says, roughly wiping her eyes, "I need a drink, and since it doesn't look like you managed to drag Haymitch along with you, we are going to have to find something in this wasteland of a district."

Peeta squeezes Katniss' hand for just a second, silently, before he goes off with Johanna, leaving Katniss and Gale alone in a small alley in District 3.

Gale knows that there is nothing he needs to apologize for; he has spent months learning to forgive others and in the process has maybe started to forgive himself, but when he sees her in front of him, scarred and broken but still standing, he finds himself breathing out "Katniss, I... I'm sorry. So sorry," his eyes shiny with tears he won't let himself shed. And she is looking at him, whispering 'sorry, I'm sorry' too, and there are tears streaming silently down her face.

Suddenly they step towards each other, into each other's arms, and they keep apologizing, not really knowing what they are apologizing for. For not being the same people that they used to be, and for all the horrible things that happened to each of them. For every time they weren't able to protect each other, and for every time that they did.

"I've missed you," she whispers. "I've missed my best friend."

"I've missed you too," he whispers back.

And they know that things will never be the same again between them, but that they are okay. They can figure this new thing out because they have been tied together too tightly for too long to let it all just go.

* * *

><p>They all work their way back to the rented house down the street, wrung out and drained. The four of them sit around the unfamiliar space, filled with someone else's things, trying to figure out how to interact with each other and sitting in deafening silence instead.<p>

Eventually Peeta walks into the kitchen, looking through the cupboards and drawers, and starts preparing rolls, pulling a small packet of yeast out of his pocket. Johanna rolls her eyes so hard she almost gives herself a muscle cramp but keeps her mouth shut. Katniss watches his every move, her fingers unconsciously moving over an invisible bow, her body rigid with tension on the edge of her seat.

In a minute, Gale wordlessly moves in next to him, deftly skinning the rabbit they had bought earlier, cutting vegetables, pulling out pans. The two of them move around the kitchen, not speaking but working side by side, accepting each other, a tenuous understanding between them.

Katniss looks over at Johanna, eyebrows raised questioningly, but the older girl just shrugs. They are all doing the best they can, the only way they know how.

Johanna smiles slyly into the silence, pulling out a bottle of white liquor that she scrounged up from somewhere, and plunks it in the middle of the table in the kitchen.

"Okay, hell if we are going to sit here, four sniveling, _mentally disoriented_ wrecks, crying with each other," she says. "Pull it together, soldiers."

She pulls down four glasses and starts mixing them drinks with whatever she can find in the house. Katniss gets Johanna's portable music player from the other room at Johanna's demand and starts fiddling with the controls, trying to find the most upbeat music chip she can.

Slowly they allow themselves to relax a little, the white liquor that burns its way down their throats helping with that.

"Johanna, this drink is terrible," Katniss says, her face puckered in a grimace. "Do not become a bartender."

"Added to the list," Johanna replies breezily. "And you will drink that drink and like it."

Gale smiles as he slips the vegetables into the oven under the rolls that are already in there. Someone else on the receiving end of her pronouncements.

The four of them move around the kitchen, Katniss setting the table, Gale and Peeta finishing cooking the meal, Johanna mixing them all another drink and telling them all what they are doing incorrectly from her perch on the kitchen counter.

They start talking, slowly, dancing around sensitive subjects, finding that everything is sensitive.

"So the love story continues, I see," Johanna smirks at Katniss.

"Yup." Katniss responds, failing to elaborate. "And I see my cousin still isn't afraid of you."

"Well, not most days," Gale answers for her, with a quick grin Johanna's way. He smiles sheepishly at Katniss, who smiles a little sadly back at him. They both know how different things are between them. They will never go back to the way things were. It's better, it's impossible to go back, but they are both a little sad nonetheless.

Peeta asks about their jobs in District 2, and Katniss listens. Gale asks about how District 12 is coming together, and they tell him; how things are the same and how things are different, who is back. They don't say anything about all the people who aren't there. They start to talk more easily, with fewer pauses after every question, every sentence, with less time spent silently trying to gauge the reactions of everyone else at the table and more time spent getting to know the people they have each started to become.

Later they sit around the table, finishing the last of their meal, laughing at a story that Peeta tells about the ever escaping gaggle of geese Haymitch has been attempting to raise, and for a second they look like four friends, enjoying each other's company, nothing more, nothing less.

* * *

><p>They don't run as often, either of them. They start to figure out how to rely on each other, these two people who had been so used to relying on no one but themselves.<p>

She is not used to having a family, she is used to having personal relationships used as bargaining chips against her, so it takes some time for her to let her guard down.

Hazelle had watched her, carefully, with the observant grey eyes that she had passed on to her son, but has clearly concluded that she likes this fiery girl, different from the one on television, whose own fire had somehow tempered her boy's. Posy had decided that they were going to be friends from the very beginning, slipping a small hand inside Johanna's and causing her to look up at Gale with an amusingly panicked look. Vick, always easy going and social, gets along with everyone. In fact, if he didn't look so much like the rest of them, Gale would wonder if they picked him up from some other family. It was Rory, so much like Gale but gentler, more sensitive, who took the longest to decide how he felt about her. But now Gale is pretty sure that Rory tells her things that he doesn't tell anyone else, or at least not his older brother.

The two of them go to District 4 as often as they can, visiting Annie, watching little Kenn grow up. He looks exactly like Finnick but with Annie's dark hair, laughingly mischievous but with her softness around his eyes. Watching him run down the beach, dragging a stick in the wet sand behind him, making friends with any man, woman, child, or bird he comes across, Johanna sees Finnick and laughs.

"You have a little heartbreaker on your hands," she says to Annie, who's tired sigh can't hide her smile.

They even go to District 12, for the groundbreaking on the new medicine factory, and again, later, Gale deciding that he wants to see what the place he used to call home is becoming. They stay with Katniss and Peeta in what used to be Peeta's house but is now theirs, for all the world like friends. Haymitch threatens Gale with a slight sway the first time he sees them.

"Don't make me have to kill you," he says looking in Johanna's direction. Gale just smiles.

"As if you could," he says, but he gives Haymitch a nod.

"And whatever you do, don't tell me about it if you guys all decide to switch again," Haymitch says while taking a large pull from the bottle in his hand. Gale just shakes his head at Haymitch's back.

And they are making a difference, both of them. They work hard and they see results. Their lives are full, and they are happy. So he doesn't understand when he finds her one day motionless in the middle of the living room staring up at the ceiling, her old, ratty shoulder bag clutched in her hands.

"I didn't know you still had that thing," he says slowly as he approaches her carefully.

She snaps her head down toward him at the noise, and he can see the sheer terror in her eyes.

"Jo," he says quietly, still walking slowly toward her, "what's going on?"

He pries the bag carefully out of her fingers as she still doesn't say anything to him, looking like the only thing that is keeping her in one place is the tension of trying to run in four different directions at once.

"I thought…" His eyebrows knit together in concern. "I thought we loved," his voice catches just a little on the word. "Each other…"

She looks at him and inhales for what seems like the first time since he found her.

"I'm pregnant," she says quietly.

And now he can only stare at her in stunned silence while she looks increasingly worriedly at him.

His mind whirls, flooded with a hundred thoughts, a hundred emotions.

"Say something," she snaps at him, breaking his reverie.

He looks at her, a smile breaking out over his face. This is a new step, and it is as scary as anything he has ever faced, but he knows that they can do it together.

"Marry me. Marry me Johanna Mason," he says.

She looks at him in surprise, but his face is joyful and earnest, so she laughs, clear and light as a bell.

"Why do you always call me that? And that's it? That's all you have to say? I drop this terrifying piece of information on you and you just want to go and making even more fucking terrifying?"

He just smiles at her. He is sure, more sure than he has even been of anything in his life.

"We can do anything together," he says to her. "We prove it every day. We can do this."

Her shoulders relax. She is starting to look like she might believe him.

"Fine," she says as she closes the space between them, "but I am keeping my name."

* * *

><p>They have a boy, followed by another, and a baby girl last.<p>

"Stupid Capitol doctor probably couldn't find his own penis with two hands and a map let alone figure out anything about anyone else's parts," she had grumbled the third time. "This baby maker is closed for business."

Gale had laughed, but she thinks that they were both secretly relieved when their last one was a girl.

The first time she had looked down into the face of her little boy, she felt something in part of her heart that she thought she had lost long ago. She knew that whatever else she had done or not done, whatever she had lost or taken with her, the fact that her little boy would never have to watch a piece of paper that may or may not have his name written on it pulled from a huge bowl on a stage meant that she had done something right, something worthy.

Katniss and Peeta come to visit after their daughter is born. After seven years of exemplary reports from Dr. Aurelius and Haymitch, Katniss is finally free to move around the country like any other citizen, and Johanna appreciates the adult company.

Gale and Peeta go out with a couple of guys from Gale's office to play darts and drink beer at one of the new bars that have opened up in town, filled with games from before the Dark Days, when people used to play games. Katniss watches them go with a slightly bewildered look on her face, like she still can't believe that the two of them actually seem to like each other.

Katniss sits in the boys' room playing with Luka and Culley while the baby sleeps. She loves the boys, but she is not easy with them like Peeta is; unlike him, she finds that there is a limit to the number of games of peek-a-boo she can play in one sitting, and she always seems amazed that they aren't scared of her, that they love her back. Johanna comes into the room as Katniss and Culley attempt to build a multi-colored tower with the blocks Peeta painted especially for him, while Luka waits for the chance to destroy whatever it is they create. Katniss' voice fills the room as she hilariously narrates every move in a sing-song voice.

"There's my beautiful boy," Johanna coos as Culley catches sight of her. Katniss smiles a little and wishes that Finnick could have seen his acidic Johanna Mason like this. That Johanna and this Johanna seem like two different people. In many ways, they are, she thinks to herself. They all are.

"How do you do it?" Katniss asks softly after a while, looking at the blocks she is turning over in her hands.

Johanna turns from her son to look at Katniss carefully. "Well, I didn't have much choice in the matter," she starts, but there is an edge of laughter in her voice. "Those brainless doctors didn't know they were up against the Hawthorne seed, and by the time we figured out that little problem, it was already too late."

"Ugh, come on, I don't need to hear anything about any 'Hawthorne seed.' Ew."

"It is just so powerful. Beyond the understandings of modern medicine," Johanna laughs, the naked girl in the elevator again. Katniss throws a block at her with a smile. But she looks at Johanna questioningly again, and Johanna sobers.

"It was terrifying," Johanna starts again, slowly. "It _is_ terrifying."

She pauses and looks at Katniss. She knows that Peeta wants children, anyone who sees him with Kenn or her own children could see that, so she watches the girl carefully as Katniss absently plays with the blocks in her lap with fear and uncertainty in her eyes.

"I still don't know if I can do it. But I love them so much I know I am going to try. No matter what. I didn't know I could love something this much." This is what makes Katniss look up at her.

"Yeah, it scares me," she responds to Katniss' silent questions, "But loving them makes me better. And Gale is always there. Like Peeta would be." Johanna wonders if she is pushing the issue, but Katniss just nods.

"I think it is good that it happened the way it did for me. If I had had any choice, if I had been able to think about it at all, I don't think I ever would have been able to put myself up for this type of risk. Not after everything I had lost." She stops.

"But they are pretty great," she says as she wrestles Luka, who had started climbing on her back, over her shoulder as he giggles. "Aren't you? Aren't you pretty great?"

"I just..." Katniss drops her eyes again, and Johanna stands Luka up and tells him to color at the table with his brother.

"Yeah."

"Look, don't do anything you don't want to do. That's what we fought for. And it is hard. _Hard._" She pauses, thinking.

"When Luka was first learning to walk, he tripped and fell into the table downstairs. Banged his head. And that was the first time he had really hurt himself, you know? He had a mark. On his head. And I hadn't protected him from it. It was terrifying." She looks intently at Luka like she could still see where the mark had been.

"I think I cried harder than he did. If Gale hadn't come home right then, I am pretty sure I would have taken that table to the backyard and axed it into splinters. Splinters." Johanna shakes her head at the memory. "You tell anyone that story, and I _will_ kill you."

"But now? I can't imagine my life any other way. I can't imagine life without them. They make me happier than anything I have ever known." She looks at Katniss again. "And I tried most colors of those Capitol pills back in the day, so I should know."

Their other boys come home then, Gale complaining that Peeta must be finding some way to cheat at darts. These old games are quickly gaining popularity as life becomes less of a daily struggle for regular citizens, and somehow Peeta, easy going and charming, excels at all of them. Gale always clamors for a bow when playing with him, amazed that such a mediocre shot can be so good at this stupid game.

"It's the gentle touch, Gale," Peeta is laughing as they come down the stairs, Johanna carrying Culley and Katniss holding Luka by the hand. "You have to _feel _it. Don't make me feel sorry for Johanna..."

Luka struggles to free his hand from Katniss' when he sees Gale, so Katniss lets him go, lets him run over to his daddy, who scoops him up and hangs him upside down for a second with a _hey little man_. Gale bends for a quick hello kiss from Johanna before dropping a kiss on Culley's head.

"Anybody wakes the baby, I kill 'em," Johanna says warningly with a smile.

Katniss and Peeta stand a little off to the side, hands clasped together, taking in the family tableau with smiles that have just a little sadness behind them before Peeta continues, "So Johanna, your husband continues to embarrass himself at darts. It's getting sad, really. You might have to think about divorce."

* * *

><p>Sometimes she doesn't recognize herself, anchored down by so many things, so many people, yet loving them for it. Sometimes she doesn't recognize this life of hers that was built on the razed ground of everything she ever known, but she knows that the cost of that foundation was so high, that she has to do everything she can to make it worth it. And most of the time, she succeeds. They succeed.<p>

She knows there are things, horrible things, that she will never forget, but she also knows there are joys beyond anything she could imagine still waiting for her. The only thing to do is move forward, not at a run, not to escape something else, but with her head held high and shoulders square.

It's later than usual when she opens the door to their little house, expanded by the work of their own hands, and is immediately accosted by one of her boys smearing pale pink frosting across her pants. She walks a little farther into the house, coming onto a scene of barely controlled chaos in the kitchen. She catches the guilty look of her husband as he is caught in the act of spooning cake into their little girl's mouth. The remainder that is sitting on the counter looks distinctly like something Peeta must have sent up on the express train.

She looks down, suppressing a smile, before looking back at him as seriously as she can with dancing eyes.

"What on earth is going on here? I show up one hour late and all semblance of order goes out the window? We just eat cake for dinner and run wild hopped up on sugar?"

Gale starts to stammer something as she throws her jacket on a chair, clearing dishes and wiping down the table before she cuts herself a big piece of cake and sits down, pulling her oldest onto her lap.

"Well, that blond sop always did know how to bake," she says as she takes a bite. She looks around the room, noting the dangerous location of a toy train and the mysterious presence of a single, unmatched shoe. She shakes her head a little as she watches Culley get more milk down his shirt front than into his mouth. She smiles as she breathes in the little boy smell of her son and takes another big bite of cake.

Gale catches her eye with a little shrug and smiles back.

Most of the time, they succeed.


End file.
